In Soft Garments A Collection Of Oxford Conferences

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IN SOFT GARMENTS

A Collection of
Oxford Conferences

by

RONALD A. KNOX

They that are clothed in soft garments are
in the Palaces of Kings. Matthew xL 8.

SHEED & WARD
NEW YORK

Nimi OBSTAT: THOMAS E. BIRD, S.T.D.

CENSOR DEPVTATVS
IMPRIMATVR: * THOMAS

ARCHE6HSCOPVS BIRMINGAMIENSIS

BIRMINGAMIAE: DIE vm NOVEMBRIS MCMXLI

First published Jan.
Reprinted Sept.
Second edition

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

To

GERVASE MATHEW

of die Order of Preachers,

for whom this book contains nothing new.

PREFACE

J HEN the Holy See gave a general permission
for Catholics to matriculate at Oxford and
Cambridge, the stipulation was made that
lectures should be provided for them, to safe-
guard their faith against the influence of an
uncongenial atmosphere. During the years between 1926 and
1938, when I was chaplain at Oxford, I delivered a good
many of these myself; and I have collected some of them in
this book, in the hope that they may suggest useful lines of
thought to a wider (though I hope not much more learned)
audience. In particular, I suppose that the subjects here dis-
cussed are such as figure, not infrequently, in. the programme
of the Catholic Evidence Guild. It will be seen, from a glance
at the title-page, that this book does not represent a complete
course in any branch of apologetics. But I have tried to deal,
unprofessionally, with some of the hesitations that most
naturally occur to us Catholics, when we compare our intel-
lectual commitments with the current thought of the present
day. I have only altered the text where it contained topical
allusions which might baffle the uninitiated reader. If I have
not gone further, by removing traces of colloquialism and
undignified illustrations here and there, it is because I dare
to hope some of those who listened to the original utterances
will come across the book (in circumstances how strangely
remote from the past!), and refresh themselves, as they turn
over its pages, with the memory of familiar things.

R. A. KNOX
Aldenham, 1941.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Cross-word of Creation i

II. "Mind" and "Matter" .... 9

III. If God Exists 19

IV. White-washing Caliban .... 27
V. Under Pontius Pilate 36

VI. The Claim 45

VII. Early in the Morning , . . . 54

VIII. Egyptian Enchantments .... 64

IX. The Living "Witness ..... 74

X. The Unholiness of the Church ... 84

XI. "Wheat in the Cockle 92

XII. Faith Lost and Found .... 100

XIII. The Unconscious Catholic . . .no

XIV. Into all Truth 120

XV. The Key Man . . . . . .129

XVI. Verbum Caro facturn est . . . . 137

XVII. Et habitavit in nobis 147

XVIII. Immortality 156

XIX. The Church and Human Progress . . 165

XX. The Three Moralities 174

XXI. Morality and Convention. . . .183

XXII. Cutting the Knot .. .... 189

XXIII. Unselfishness in Marriage . . . . 197

XXIV. The Torch Handed on . . .206

I* ix

THE CROSS-WORD OF CREATION

|HE fifth of the five classical arguments for the
existence of God is taken from the existence
of order in the natural world, and infers from
that the existence of an eternal Mind which
devised it. That is, on the whole, the stupid
man's argument, which makes it convenient for me to treat
of it; also it is the argument which is most discussed nowa-
days, partly for the same reason, and partly because die scien-
tific materialists are always discovering, every fifty years or
so, that they have now found out a way of giving it its death-
blow. Let me just state it first of all as St Thomas gives it.
"We see that some things, which lack consciousness, namely
natural bodies, work for an end ; which appears from the fact
that they work always or quite frequently in a uniform way,
so as to achieve that which is best. Whence it is clear that they
reach their end not by mere chance but by intention. But
things which have no consciousness do not aim at an end
unless they are directed by some one who has consciousness
and intelligence, as an arrow is directed by the archer. There-
fore there is some intelligent principle by which natural things
are ordained to an end ; and this we call God."

Now, that is really an argument from the existence of order
or law in nature generally ; it is not simply the popular argu-
ment from design. The argument from design is an attempt to
prove the existence of God and the Goodness of God in one.

2 In Soft Garments

It says, How could such and such things happen unless a
fatherly Providence had arranged that they should happen?
For example, about this time of the year you get those red
berries on the hedges which I used to call hips and haws. And
it was a belief instilled into my childhood that if you found a
great many of them on the hedges in autumn it meant there
was going to be a very cold winter. The ground would be so
hard or so covered in snow that the poor little dicky-birds
wouldn't be able to get any nice worms to eat, so Providence
had arranged that they should have berries instead. I have
never been able to persuade myself that the facts were as
stated; but if they are it is easy to see the force of the
argument. "It can't be just an accident that the berries
are always there in abundance just when they are most
wanted; you can only explain it by supposing diat there is
a beneficent Mind at work conspiring for the conservation
of creatures."

Of course that nursery argument gets more difficult when
you are outside the nursery. It involves die assumption that
you know what is best, and believe in God because you find
him doing it. We saw our aunts throwing bread-crumbs out
of the front window, and we pictured Providence as throw-
ing hips and haws out of the front windows of heaven to
secure the same self-evidently good end namely the survival
of the dicky-birds. It was only later we came to realize that if
no birds were killed off by frosts, cats, and other natural
means, the world would become uncomfortably crowded
with birds and there would be less fruit in the garden. And
that is, of course, the bother about the argument from design, ;
you are up against the pessimist who says, "Yes, but I can't
see that what you call Providence is working to a good end/'
As Lord Russell puts it with his usual trenchancy, "Do you
think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omni-
science and millions of years in which to perfect your world,

The Cross-word of Creation 3

you could produce nothing better than Ku Klux Klan and the
Fascist! and Mr Winston Churchill?" The bother is we don't
understand what God's plan is ; we aren't meant to ; we are
only meant to see it in bits. And to that extent any argument
based on the beneficence of Providence is difficult to bring
home to people. But, of course, what has killed the argument
from design from the man in the street's point of view and
in such matters the man in the street does not gready differ
from the man in the quad is the Darwinian theory of natural
selection. We used to think how kind it was of Providence
to have given the Polar bear a nice woolly coat before putting
it down in the Arctic regions. The chimpanzee, for example,
which has a delicate chest, would never have stood the rigours
of an Arctic winter. Well, since Darwin popularized natural
selection, we have a different explanation of all that. Either
the Polar bear trekked northwards to find food, not minding
the cold, whereas the chimpanzee stayed at home; or else
there were originally chimpanzees at the North Pole, but
later it turned cold there and killed off the chimpanzees while
leaving the Polar bears. There's no design about it; only just
accident.

Well, of course, we all know that the last word hasn't been
said yet about the doctrine of natural selection. One thing is
quite clear, and that is that it doesn't explain all that it set out
to explain ; the scientists have quite given up supposing that
it can. But the man in the street, and with him the man in the
quad, have come to take this rather dated point of view so
much for granted, that it is no longer any use talking to them
about design. So what I want to put before you this morning
is the argument from order and law in nature. And I don't
believe that St Thomas meant to use the argument from
design when he gave his fifth proof. I don't think what im-
pressed St Thomas was the fact that everything conspires
together for a beneficent purpose ; what impressed him was

4 In Soft Garments

the fact that things conspire together at all. " We see things,"
he says, "of different natures agreeing in one order, not
occasionally or as if by chance, but always or in the greater
number of instances." We are not concerned to prove that the
world was ordained by a loving Mind ; all we are out to prove
is that, for better or worse, it was ordained by a Mind, and
there is no other explanation of it.

To see that argument in its crude form you have only to
isolate some corner of nature as we know it, and reflect on the
order which we observe there. We won't talk about sunsets
or the song of the nightingale, we won't bring sentiment into
the thing at all. But take, say, the geometrical patterns which
frost makes on a window-pane. A pattern, repeated again and
again ; a pattern, based on certain mathematical proportions ;
how did that get there? If you tried drawing those same
patterns with your eyes shut, how often would you get them
right? And if mere naked chance ruled the universe, why
should nature produce patterns any more than you would
drawing with your eyes shut? The delicate tracery of a leaf,
the exact design into which sand falls on a brass plate, when a
violin-bow is drawn along the edge how is it, unless there is
a Mind to direct them, that inanimate things work themselves
out according to a fixed scheme, not occasionally or as if by
chance, but always or in die great majority of instances?
Why, inanimate nature can actually beat our intelligent
minds when it comes to putting the scheme into practice. We
have in our heads the idea of a straight line, but we can't draw
a straight line. If you put a blade of grass and a razor blade
under a microscope, the grass is really a straight line, and the
razor is all waggly. Order, then, in nature, is something
which our minds can appreciate ; but our minds didn't put
it there ; our minds find it there. And what put it there, except
another Mind? A cross-word which a mind can solve took a
mind to make it up. Order is the cipher by which Mind

The Cross-word oj Creation 5

speaks to mind in die midst of chaos ; that's what we mean by
the fifth proof

In order to appreciate the strength of that argument, it is
instructive to notice how the more intelligent opponents of
Christianity labour to destroy it, and how ineffectively. Lord
Russell, for example, in his tract called Why I am not a Chris-
tian, actually tries to play off against us the principle of inde-
terminacy. He says: " Where you can actually get down to
any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you find that they
are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the
laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort
that would emerge from mere chance. . . . That makes this
whole business of natural law much less impressive than it
formerly was." He refers, of course, to all that Heisenberg
business which was popularized by Sir James Jeans some years
ago ; the idea that when you get down to the tiniest compo-
nents of the atom you find that they don't work, apparently,
by any law ; they each act as they choose, so to speak, and it
is only the law of averages that puts things right. Very well
then, says Lord Russell, where's your law and order in nature
now? It's all anarchy, governed by statistics. That was some
years ago ; since then, Sir Arthur Eddington has been exploit-
ing this same principle of indeterminacy in the interests of
religion ; he uses it, for example, to defend free will. Accord-
ingly you find Lord Russell in his book, The Scientific Out-
look, arguing feverishly on exactly the opposite side, "The
principle of Indeterminacy does nothing whatever to show
that the course of nature is not determined. . . . The principle
of Indeterminacy has to do with measurement, not with
causation. . . . There is nothing whatever in the principle of
Indeterminacy to show that any physical event is uncaused."
Just so ; I have no doubt he is quite right ; the fact that we can-
not predict the behaviour of the atom does not mean that the
behaviour of the atom is arbitrary. Only, what a pity Lord

6 In Soft Garments

Russell did not remember that in the Battersea Town Hall, on
Sunday, March 6, 1927, at a meeting summoned under the
auspices of the South London "branch of the National Secular
Society, he himself used this same principle of indeterminacy
to show that the argument from order in nature was no
longer any use!

I always find it so hard to imagine how people can look at
the order of creation around them and content their minds
with the supposition that it got there by chance. Nothing
but dead matter to start with, and then mysteriously arising
amidst that dead matter living things, with the power of
organic growth ; and then amidst those living things, mysteri-
ously again, conscious things, capable of feeling and of
moving from place to place ; and then amidst those conscious
things, still more mysteriously, a self-conscious being, Man,
with his mind capable of turning back upon itself and be-
coming its own object. The whole of creation leading up
gradually to higher and higher stages of existence, with
Mind as the last stage of all and yet somehow Mind must
have been there from the first, or how, from the first, did
cosmos emerge from chaos; how, from the first, could
creation have contained the germs of Mind, unless Mind
had put them there? What do they make of it all, the
materialists ?

Oh, they say, that's all right ; it's just a sort of accident, a
sort of outside* chance ; after all, sooner or later these outside
chances are bound to come off. Look at all the millions of
worlds there are ; is it very surprising that just a few of them,
perhaps two or three, should have had the kind of climate
which makes life possible? And since that happened, it was
more or less bound to happen that in one of these at least the
possibility should be actually realized, and life, followed by
conscious life, followed by self-conscious life, should appear.
I've never been able to find that argument very impressive;

The Cross-word of Creation 7

it starts all right, but it seems to flicker in the middle. I mean,
it's quite easy to see that with millions of worlds about you
are likely to get one or two, and one or two only, with the
kind of climate we have, on which, therefore, life is possible.
But it's one thing to say the odds are on there being one or
two bodies, like Mars and ourselves, on which life is
possible ; it's quite another thing to say the odds are on life
actually coming to exist, here or in Mars or anywhere. As I
wrote in a book somewhere, "if the police were to discover
a human body in Lord Russell's Saratoga trunk, he would
not be able to satisfy them with the explanation that, among
all the innumerable articles of luggage in the world, it is
only natural that there should be some few which are large
enough to contain a body. They would want to know
how it got there." How did life arise just out of a
particular lot of atoms happening to get jumbled together?
If so, there is our second coincidence; those particular atoms
happen to get jumbled up on a planet with a climate which
happens to support life ; and that life happens to survive. And
later on, by a fresh accident, some of these plants happen to
develop sensation, and these sensitive plants happen to survive
and become animals; and then certain animals happen to
develop the habit of reflective thought, and those particular
animals happen to survive, and turn into men altogether
there is rather too much coincidence there. Accident is all
right as an explanation at first, but there comes a point at
which the thing begins to look like carelessness.

And, of course, even if you could prove that life (for ex-
ample) arises automatically out of some particular arrange-
ment of atoms we haven't proved it, and we are no nearer
proving it than we ever were the question would still re-
main to be asked, what power it was which ordained that
such an arrangement of atoms should result in the birth of a
quite new order of existence; "that out of three sounds he

8 In Soft Garments

frame, not a fourth sound, but a star." It's no good telling us
that the forces of nature did that ; nature is only an abstraction,
and the forces of nature are only abstractions ; abstractions
can't impose their will on real things. You must beheve,
sooner or later, in a Mind which brought mind into existence
out of matter, unless you are going to sit down before the
hopeless metaphysical contradiction of saying that matter
somehow managed to develop itself into mind.

I'm afraid I've wandered about a good deal, and perhaps
tried to take in too much in my argument. But I did want you
to see that the argument from order in the universe is not,
necessarily at any rate, die same as the argument from design.
It's not necessary for us to prove that we are living in the best
of all possible worlds; it doesn't matter (for the purposes of
our present argument) whether the laws we find in nature are
beneficent or harmful in their operation ; the point is that
order exists in the Universe, and that it is logically impossible
to conceive of order existing without a Mind. And if we
denied the existence of that Mind, and went on thinking
about it hard, it wouldn't be very long, I fancy, before most
of us would go out of our own.

II

MIND" AND "MATTER

I talk about mind and matter, I am not
going to attempt any precise definition of
those terms; I am going to use tliem in a
popular sense, the good, old-fashioned sense
in which they were used by late-Victorian
journalists. In that loose sense, the two terms between them
exhaust our experience ; everything of which we are con-
scious falls under one head or the other. Matter stands for
all those things other than oneself, outside oneself (if I may
use such grossly popular terms), which form the object of
one's experience; it is the brute fact which you can't get
away from, the rude reality which obtrudes itself into your
thought. If you are in the dentist's chair and shut your eyes
and try to imagine that you are in a hot bath or in a punt on
the river, that relentless drill comes .buzzing round and
having fun with your nerves, the symbol of matter triumph-
ing over mind, insisting on making itself felt and being
taken into consideration. The pleasant kingdom of the mind
has no real frontiers to defend it ; our thought cannot just
select its own objects, as it would like to, they force them-
selves upon it; there is a something not ourselves which we
cannot control or organize at will; let that, serve for our
very inadequate definition of matter.

But matter doesn't cover the whole of our experience;
there can be no experience unless there is a mind to do the

9

io In Soft Garments

experiencing. If you tell a man to count how many people
there are in the room, the odds are that he will return the
figure one short, because by a trick of unconscious modesty
he will have forgotten to include himself. And in the same
sort of way unreflective people will be so absorbed in the
things which are the objects of their experience, that they will
forget the part which their mind plays in it all. I remember
long ago, when he was a young don, the present Archbishop
of York telling me that he was talking to a working man who
had given expression to some rather materialist sentiments ;
and he turned on the young man and challenged him to
prove his own existence. To which his only reply was, " Ow,
don't talk like that ; you make me feel quite funny." "Well, of
course, some people don't like feeling funny, and try to for-
get their own existence in the steady contemplation of out-
ward fact. But it won't do ; if you have persuaded the dentist
to give you a whiff of gas, all that business with the drill can't
get itself across ; your mind is free-wheeling away in delight-
ful avenues of experience, discovering profound philosophical
secrets which it tries to explain to the dentist on waking up,
only to find that the secret is just a meaningless string of
words. Strictly speaking, if you come to think of it, existence
as you know it is divided exactly in half; one half is the
things you know and the other half is your mind knowing
them.

That we can't fail to realize, the moment we stop to think
about it. But what does give us an uncomfortable feeling
about this relation of mind to matter is the fact that our minds
are so closely wedded to our brains, and through them to our
patently material bodies. An accident to the brain can send a
man mad for the rest of his life ; and there are all sorts of other
ways, you can easily think of dozens of them, in which matter
seems to have the whip hand over mind; indigestion,
drunkenness, drugs, and so on, all affecting the life of the

"Mind" and "Matter" n

mind through the life of the body. So that it looks as if the
mind had to play second fiddle after all ; and people who like
to use sham-scientific language will not be slow to tell you
that the processes of the mind are only a function of the brain.
That word "function" is a glorious piece of mumbo-jumbo ;
it means, in that connection, exactly nothing whatever. It
may be true that each mental experience you have is con-
nected with, nay, so far as our present experience goes, is
inseparably connected with, some little groove inside one's
brain ; I wish I could ever learn how to talk scientific language
properly. But that isn't to say that your thought is THE SAME
THING as the groove in your brain, which would obviously be
nonsense. And to say that the one is a function of the other is
simply introducing a mathematical term to cover up the non-
sense. What does happen, if you come to think of it, when a
person goes mad ; what do we really know about it? All we
know is, that the mind can only receive its impressions, can
only express itself, through a mysterious liaison with the
material body which belongs to it. When that liaison is dis-
turbed, I suppose you have the same kind of situation that you
have when a deaf organist is playing on an organ in which all
the stops are out of tune. He may be the best organist in the
world, but the noise that comes out will be simply beastly,
because the organ with which he is expressing himself is quite
inadequate to his powers of performance. We simply don't
know what has happened to the mind ; all we know is that
there has been an interruption in its sources of communication
with the outside world.

But there is another temptation, I think, that most of us
have had at times, which makes us think of mind as somehow
inferior to matter. I mean the idea that mind is something
unnecessary, a sort of additional detail which has somehow
blossomed out from matter like flowers from the branches
of a tree. Matter is the solid, self-subsistent thing ; is mind

12 In Soft Garments

anything better than a mysterious excrescence on it ? And if it's
no better than that, shan't we be obliged to admit that matter
has a sort of priority over mind? For instance, if all minds
suddenly ceased to exist in the world, the world would go on
quite happily, with white ants or octopuses or something
occupying die position of nature's darling instead of man. Or
even if you cut out all sentient life, there would be an interest-
ing struggle to see which weeds overran which. But if you
imagine all matter suddenly ceasing to exist at this minute,
what picture can we form, apart from our theological pre-
possessions, about what the world would be like? I shouldn't
be able to finish off this conference ; I should be in a worse
position than a deaf man talking to dumb men; I shouldn't
even be able to make faces at you. And, of course, there
would be even more serious consequences than that. A world
of blanks, moving about in a blank world that is the only
picture we can form to ourselves with our present perhaps
limited powers of imagination. Mind seems to depend on
matter so much ; matter to depend on mind so little.

Well, if you think a little deeper, you will see that that
argument really tells in exactly the opposite direction. In so
far as matter is important to the existence of mind, whereas
mind is not important to the existence of matter, in that
proportion we are emboldened to say that mind must, in the
ultimate constitution of things, have ahigher value and impor-
tance than matter has. For you can conceive of matter as exist-
ing for the sake of mind, whereas you cannot possibly think
of mind as existing for the sake of matter. Take those twirli-
gigs in our brains, which are the concomitants, the material
coefficient, of our thought. It is possible to suppose that in
some way those twirligigs are meant to pave die way for
our thoughts, to facilitate our thoughts. Whereas it would be
plain nonsense to suppose that our thoughts facilitate, or pave
the way for, those twirligigs. The waggling of my tongue.

"Mind" and "Matter" 13

and the twitching of your ears, do subserve aa end, though it
may not be a very important end, by making it possible for
me to transfer my thoughts to your intelligence. But it would
be ridiculous to imagine that my thoughts exist for the pur-
pose of making my tongue waggle, or your ears twitch. That
which exists for the sake of something else must have less
value, in the ultimate nature of things, than that for the sake
of which it exists. Pills exist for the sake of health, not health
for the sake of pills ; which means that health is a more
important thing than pills, and so on. And therefore, just in
proportion as mind is useless to matter, in that proportion it
claims to be a more worth-while thing than matter. So the
materialist's boomerang has come back and hit him in the
face.

And there is, of course, another very simple and obvious
consideration which asserts the priority of mind over matter ;
I mean the fact that whereas matter can only be the object of
thought, mind can be its object as well as its subject. The
mind of man, unlike brute matter, unlike even (unless we are
strangely deceived in diem) the consciousness of other
sentient creatures, can turn back upon itself and become self-
conscious, become aware of itself as thinking. That which
can thus fulfil a double role in the scheme of existence must
surely have a greater fullness of life and of meaning than that
which is confined to a single role.

All that, perhaps, may help to allay a scruple which we are
apt to get when we hear the scholastic proofs of the existence
of God set out. It occurs to us, I mean, to wonder whether the
God whose existence philosophy proves is not a kind of
abstraction, instead of being a living Person. The proof from
order, to be sure, does introduce us to the thought of a Mind
by which this order was planned. But when we are told of a
Necessary Being, presupposed by all the contingent beings
around us, or of a Best which is implied by our better, we are

14 In Soft Garments

tempted to think of that reality as if it were neuter, as if we
ought to talk about IT, not about HIM. But if mind has this
priority over matter in the order of being, then there is no
question that the ultimate reality must belong to this superior
category of Mind, must be, like ourselves, although not with
the limitations which the word implies in ourselves, a Person.

There, perhaps, you will expect my meditation to come to
an end; you will suppose that I have exhausted all I am
capable of saying about mind and matter. But if so, you've
forgotten something. Anybody who is in the habit of trying
to do cross-words will be familiar with the irritating experi-
ence of puzzling for half an hour or so over a clue that just
says "ORDER," or "OBJECT," diinking it is a noun, and then
suddenly realizing that all the time it was meant to be a verb.
In the same way, I told you I was going to give you a medita-
tion on "mind" and "matter" ; and I shouldn't have fulfilled
my commission if I didn't point out to you that mind and
matter aren't necessarily nouns ; they can also be verbs. It's a
curious thing, you know, because the English language is not
generally supposed to be a good one for expressing philoso-
phical thoughts. And yet as far as I know English is the only
language which turns mind into a verb and matter into a verb.
And more than that, although boda usages are little better
than slang, I think they have a delicate exactness of meaning*
Mattering is really connected with what we mean by matter,
and minding is really connected with what we mean by mind.

You won't need any profound analysis of what the two
verbs do mean. If you are accepting an invitation to dinner,
but are anxious to go on to a meeting or a concert or some-
thing at nine, you end up your note, "I hope it won't
matter if I go just before nine," or "I hope you won't mind
if I go just before nine." The sense is, in either case, I hope
there is no objection to my going before nine. But we have
these two colloquial ways of expressing the same idea, and

"Mnd" and "Matter" 15

we give a slightly different twist to the sentiment according
as we choose one or the other. "When we say, "I hope it won't
matter," we hope that it will not transgress against the code of
politeness in general. When we say, "I hope you won't
mind," we hope it is not the kind of action which will tread
on the corns of that particular person. It is only things, you
see, which matter ; it is only persons who mind.

Now, in the exchanges of everyday life, I think it will
always be found that when we say, "It doesn't matter," we
always mean, "I shan't mind," or "Somebody or other
won't mind." The latter formula is a more exact definition of
our thought. If you say, "It doesn't matter whether I get
through Pass Mods at the end of this term," you mean either
"I don't mind," or "The dons won't mind," or "My people
won't mind." If you say, "It doesn't matter whether I go to
Gloucester via Swindon or via Kingham," you mean either
that the journey takes as long in either case, so you don't
mind, or that your ticket is available for either route, and the
shareholders of the G.W.R., who are enriched in either case,
don't mind. Mattering, in the ordinary affairs of life, is always
related to somebody's convenience ; it is always, in the long
run, a person you are thinking of, a person who minds.

But you can use the verb "to matter" in what would
appear to be an absolute, not a relative sense. For instance,
somebody may ask you, "Do you think it really matters, if I
get drunk?" Well, of course, he may simply mean, "Will
the dean mind, if he finds me breaking lamps?" Or he may
simply mean, "Would you say from your experience that I
shall mind much if I have a hangover next morning?" But
the presumption on which you answer his question is a
perfectly different one. You presume him to mean, "Is there
some permanent moral law which will be violated, some equi-
librium in the nature of things (not merely in my own mind)
which will be disturbed, if I get drunk?" For once, it seems,

1 6 In Soft Garments

we have got away from the personal reference; there are
things which really matter in themselves, independently of
whether somebody minds or not. If we say that it matters a
great deal when Hitler starts persecuting the Jews, we don't
simply mean that the Jews mind ; of course they mind. And
we don't simply mean that the News Chronicle minds, because
the News Chronicle is not our ultimate test of human values.
We mean that there is some order of justice external to him-
self which Hitler is violating. The thing matters IN ITSELF.

But, when you come to think of it, can a thing matter in
itself? That is where you come up against a fresh argument
for the existence of God ; the argument from conscience. I call
it a fresh argument, because it is not explicitly stated among
the five scholastic proofs ; though, of course, you can say, if
you like, that it is only a particular development of the argu-
ment from degrees of being. If you put it in. its crude form,
the argument from conscience runs, I suppose, like this: "I
find, in my conscience, a law telling me to do this and that,
forbidding me to do this and that ; there is no law without a
law-giver ; hence a supreme Law-giver must exist, whom we
call God." But the form in which I should prefer to put it, for
the purposes of this meditation, is the question, "Can any-
thing matter, unless there is Somebody who minds?"

You see, the difficulty is not really confined to the moral
order. How can there be any absolute Truth, unless it be the
Truth which is in. God? How can there be any such thing as
beauty, with a power of its own to compel our homage, un-
less it be a reflection of the Beauty which is in God? But it is
in the moral order that we recognize the difficulty most,
because the moral order affects every decision of our wills.
How can I rest content with saying that loving my neighbour,
or following die path of duty, or respecting my own body, is
something which MATTERS, if that is all the account that cm
be given of it? It would mean that I, a person, am being

"Mind" and' 6 Matter" 17

ordered about and tyrannized over by a thing my con-
science. And that thing, my conscience, is a part of myself.
Or, if you prefer to talk about duty instead of conscience, you
are worse off still ; I, a concrete person, am being ordered
about by a thing which is an abstraction. Don't let us fall into
the error of saying that I don't obey my conscience, but the
general conscience of humanity. That is what these modern
people are always trying to do ; I got a letter only the other
day from somebody who wanted me to sign a letter protest-
ing against the persecution of the Jews "before the conscience
of civilization." But civilization is an abstraction, and it hasn't
got a conscience. What they mean is, a collection of con-
sciences belonging to a collection of civilized people ; just as
when they talk about the universal mind they only mean a
collection of individual minds. But I don't want to appeal to
my own conscience or to anybody else's conscience ; I want
to appeal to Somebody who minds, and has a right to mind,
whenever the moral law is infringed ; and he who minds must
be a Person. Short of that, I cannot make sense of the proposi-
tion that anything matters. I cannot see how any mere thing
has the right to abridge the liberties of myself, who am a
person.

That is the argument from conscience as I see it; not, I'm
afraid, put to you with due forms of philosophical discussion.
Of course, in the very last analysis, the thing is not as simple as
all that. I mean, it would be easy for somebody to pose me
with the difficulty : "Do you mean sin only matters because
God happens to mind? That murder, for example, is not
something wrong in itself, and God, if he had preferred it that
way, might just as well have commanded, Thou skalt commit
murder, as the other way round?" To that I suppose I should
reply, that in the last mysterious analysis "it matters" and
"he minds" are, in God, the same thing. Things aren't good
just because God wills them, nor does God will things just

1 8 In Soft Garments

because they are good. Goodness is his own Nature, that is,
himself. But if there were no he, if there were only an, ft,
to dictate commands to free moral beings like ourselves,
could we reconcile ourselves to the indignity of it? I know I
couldn't.

in

IF GOD EXISTS

ET me suggest this point to you that God,
I not man, must be the measure of the Uni-
verse, must he the standard by which we are
to judge all our experience. If we make man
_______ the centre of all our experience, then the

riddle of existence becomes insoluble, and we had far better
give it up.

Aristotle said that Man is the measure of all things. You see,
you must have a fixed point somewhere for the start of
every- investigation, a unit somewhere for the standard of
every computation. I seem to remember that when they
taught me science, they made me learn by heart a long for-
mula, which said, " A gramme is the weight of a cubic centi-
metre of pure water, kept at a temperature of something or
other Centigrade, at the latitude of Paris, on the level of the
sea, in vacuo" Now, that seems to me very sensible, although
it might be more useful to me if I could remember what the
temperature was. If you are going to weigh every thing in the
world by grammes, you must have a fixed standard of what
the gramme is ; otherwise you will find that on one occasion
you have used your cubic centimetre of pure water when it
was frozen, and at another time when it was liquid, and at
another time when it was half evaporated, and all your
calculations will be miles out in consequence. In fact you
will be very much in the position of the people in Alice in

19

20 In Soft Garments

Wonderland, trying to play croquet with flamingoes for
mallets and hedgehogs for croquet-balls ; the flamingoes were
always curling their necks round and the hedgehogs were
always running away, so that you never got much further.
You must have a mallet which moves only when you make
it move; you must have a croquet-ball which stays put until
you hit it, or the game is not croquet. In the same way, all
measurement and all thought depend on the possession of a
fixed unit by which your judgments can be compared.

Now, if you deny the existence of God, or if you deny it
for practical purposes by treating it as a fifty-fifty probability,
or if you use the word "God" in an insincere way, meaning
a mere abstraction or a mere ideal when you use it, then you
tave to say that man is the measure of all things ; that his
thought is the highest form of wisdom which exists, that his
conscience is the standard by which good and evil must be
determined, that his intuitions are the only test of beauty.
And indeed more than that; if you are to attain any kind of
intellectual satisfaction, you must say that man's thought is
the source of all truth, makes things true ; that his conscience
is the arbiter of good, makes things right and wrong ; that his
intuitions are the origin of all beauty, make things beautiful or
ugly. And that notion, if you press it, leads to mere intellec-
tual despair.

Man's thought is not a fixed thing. It is not merely that men
disagree with one another ; one generation of men sees things
in a different light from the generations which went before it.
There are fashions in human thought; mechanism was the
keyword of the century before last, evolution of the century
that has just gone, relativity of our own. Philosophy goes
round in circles, now realism will be the dominant teaching,
now idealism, now pragmatism ; there is no fixed point, we
are always changing. And always when the recognition of
God's existence becomes obscured in the public consciousness,

If God Exists 21

thought turns back upon itself, and wonders whether it has
any validity, and we are worse off than ever. After all, if a
person refuses to believe in the existence of a world outside
himself, and thinks that all his experience is a mere illusion,
it is impossible to prove to him that he is wrong. If he says
that two and two make five, or that time and space are a
hallucination, it is impossible to prove to him that he is
wrong. The human mind is as tortuous as any flamingo, as
volatile as any hedgehog. And we are asked, not merely to
believe that this uncertain instrument is all we have to judge
our experience by which is in a sense true but that it is
actually this erratic, eccentric mind of ours which gives things
their truth, which makes things true. Whereas if you believe
in God you know that God is Truth, and gives to all things
that exist the truth that is in them, and gives to aH minds,
according to their measure, some knowledge, although it
be an imperfect knowledge, of the truth which he sees in the
mirror of his own eternal being, perfectly as it is.

Man's conscience is not a fixed thing either. If you took a
referendum of England now, you would probably find that
in the majority of English minds war is something in itself
wicked* ; if you had taken it twelve years ago you would
have found only a fanatical minority supporting that conten-
tion. A hundred years ago, people thought of divorce as
something disgraceful ; now, most people do not think of it as
disgraceful at all. Some people want us to think that the only
criterion of right and wrong action is the comfort or discom-
fort of our fellow-men, of the community at large ; others,
that we decide between right and wrong by a kind of artistic
intuition ; others, that conscience is a voice we must obey
implicitly without asking why. Now, you will have a
precious hard time making up your mind between right
and wrong nowadays if you even treat your own unaided
* Tlus was, I think, true at the time I wrote it.

22 In Soft Garments

conscience as the judge of them. But we are asked to believe
more than that; we are asked to believe that this uncertain
instrument, the human conscience, is not merely the oracle
which tells you whether a thing is right or wrong, but
actually the authority which makes some things right and
others wrong. Whereas if you believe in God you know that
God is goodness, that he imparts to all things which exist the
good that is in them ; that he gives to our hearts, though in a
differing and an inferior measure, some appreciation of that
Goodness which he sees perfectly mirrored and summed up
in himself.

And so, still more obviously, with our intuitions about
other things, our artistic judgments for example. That men's
tastes in beauty differ is a thing which has in every age been
notorious ; if you doubt it, you have only to go and look
at the Underground Station in Piccadilly. Is there such a thing
as absolute beauty ? If so, the human rnind has taken a precious
long time in deciding what it is like. And yet if there is no
such thing as absolute beauty, the whole of art and music
become a matter of mere individual caprice. And then the
psychologists come in on the top of that, and explain that all
our judgments of beauty are really due to processes in our
unconscious minds, and rather unprintable processes at that.
If you rule out God, these faulty, inconsistent intuitions of
ours are not merely the only standard by which beauty can be
judged ; it is they that create beauty, that make things beauti-
ful what nonsense it all is! Whereas if you believe in God,
you believe that he himself is absolute beauty, and gives
beauty to all things in this creation, and to our eyes and senses
the power to see and to appreciate it.

Now, all these considerations I have been suggesting to you
are not reasons why we should believe that God exists, but
rather reasons for wanting him to exist. At least, there are
people who would try to prove the existence of God in this

If God Exists 23

way, but I should not like to depend merely on such proofs
myself. They are rather reasons for wanting God to exist. "If
there were no God, it would be necessary to invent one," as
Voltaire said, if it was Voltaire who said that. The reasons for
asserting the existence of God are reasons derived from the
very nature of the world as we know it. If the created Uni-
verse were a mere lump of inert matter, lying about in space
with no visible means of subsistence, we might perhaps feel
inclined to give up the problem of how it got there although
even its presence seems to demand the intervention of a Crea-
tor, of somebody or something which exists in its own right,
instead of merely happening to be there. But when, from this
lump of matter, a vegetable life emerges which was not there
before, and from that vegetable life animal life, and from that
animal life conscious life, the life of the mind, all with no
natural reason to account for it beyond a mere chance juxta-
position of atoms then our reason does demand that there
should be an agent at work, producing the things that were
not from the things that are. It is no good saying that life was
potentially present from the first ; we still need some agent to
bring that potency into act ; life did not evolve itself, because
until it had evolved it was not yet alive. Or alternatively, we
discover, we are still discovering in the world of our experi-
ence, laws, infinitely subtle and delicate in their operation,
which govern the ways of nature. Our minds, with great
difficulty, can discover those laws, but they did not make
those laws, they did not put them there they find them
there. And since law and order can only be the expression of
a mind, we have to believe in the existence of a Mind which
invented those laws and imposed them upon brute nature.
And so once more we find it necessary to believe in a Creative
Intelligence, that is in God.

But now, you see, in proving the existence of God we find
that we have gone further, and proved a whole lot of things

24 In Soft Garments

about God. All the attributes of God, his simplicity, bis im-
mutability and so on, are not something which we learn from
the Bible, or from the tradition of the Church, they are some-
thing which we learn from reason itself, learn from that same
process of reasoning by which we prove that God exists. It is
no good asserting the existence of a Creator who is not omni-
potent; for if he is not omnipotent he is limited who or
what is it that limits him? You will have to fall back on
assuming the existence of some power greater than that of the
Creator himself. It is no good asserting the existence of a God
who is not simple, who is in any way composite ; for if so you
will have to fall back on assuming the existence of some
power which produced that fusion of elements in him. And
so on all through; the proofs from which we learn the exis-
tence of God give us some idea, necessarily, of his Nature.

Many muddle-headed people who think they cannot get
on without God, if they really sat down to argue out the
question of his existence, would find that they had let them-
selves in for a good deal more than they bargained for. They
want God to exist as a sort of background to their lives ; they
want to feel that there is a supreme truth in which all our
imperfect guesses after truth find their meaning ; that there is
a supreme Goodness towards which all our feeble moral
effort strives ; that there is a beauty which is beyond all earthly
beauty, and is the explanation of it. That is what they mean
by God ; that is what they are wanting when they say they
want God. But if they would only try to puzzle out the
mystery of his Being they would find that he is a great deal
more than that. They would find that he is a Personal Being,
infinitely removed in dignity from this universe, his created
handiwork ; outside all time and all space ; not limited, as we
are limited, by imperfections of nature; not composite as we
are composite, not changeable as we are changeable; the
Creator of all things, and such a Creator as not only gave

If God Exists 25

them being but maintains them, from moment to moment,
in being ; who made them all for his glory, yet would have
lacked nothing of that eternal blessedness which he enjoys if
nothing had ever existed outside himself. That is the God they
would find, if they would look for him ; for whom they will
not look because they are afraid of finding him.

They wanted God to exist as a sort of background to their
lives ; but if you once prove that he exists, you will find that
he fills the whole stage. Man is no longer the centre of the
Universe God is the centre of the Universe. Man is no
longer the measure of all things, God is the measure of all
things. All the greatness of man, all his splendid achievements
in art and in music and in learning and in the conquest of
nature, in laws and governments, in heroism and endurance,
fade away into the background and become something very
insignificant, when they are seen in contrast with the incom-
municable Majesty of Almighty God. Lord, what is man, that
thou rememberest him, or the son of man, that thou visitest
him? So brief his existence, so puny his stature, so limited the
possibilities of his being.

And it is not merely that God, once we have caught some
hint of what he is, fills the whole picture and dwarfs his own
creatures by the contrast. We begin to see, too, that God has
claims upon man, which know of no limits and admit of no
qualifications. We are God's creatures, drawn by him out of
nothing, and ready, but for the continued exercise of his
power, to fall back into that nothingness whence we came ;
his dominion over us is absolute, and all his kindness in his
dealings with us springs from the goodness of his own nature,
not from any rights, not from any value, of ours. And having
such dominion over us, he will expect from us love and wor-
ship and service, unquestioning obedience to his will for us ;
he will want to be the end of all our actions, as he is the end
of all created things. So that our actions will no longer be

26 In Soft Garments

regulated by our own measure, but by his. We shall not need
to ask, "Is this course of action profitable to me, is it pleasant
to me, is it worthy of me, is it a true expression of my own
nature, is it the kind of action I myself should approve in my
calmer moments, will it leave my character the nobler for its
effects?" No, all those calculations, based upon human pride,
will be superseded, will be put on one side ; there is only one
question which will be the ultimate rule of conduct "Is this
course of action the course of action by which it is God's will
to be glorified in me?"

For us Catholics, and for all those who take their religion
seriously, this sense of the overwhelming Majesty of God is
the first consideration, comes before, even, our sense of his
love and of his mercy ; our God is a jealous God, is a consum-
ing Fire ; there is nothing we can do for him that we do not
owe to him, no praise of him which can seem extravagant, no
self-abasement before him which can seem undignified. In
saying that God exists, we have admitted that he is every-
thing, that man is nothing. To realize that unique Majesty of
his, to realize this pitiable nothingness of ours that is the dis-
position into which, if we have followed them, this term's
conferences ought to lead us.

IV
WHITE-WASHING CALIBAN

[E have been discussing the possibility of prov-
ing the existence of God by the use of our
natural reason. There are arguments, and co-
gent arguments, by which that doctrine can
be demonstrated without any recourse to a
revelation, either to such an imperfect revelation as was given
to the Jews through Moses, or to the perfect revelation which
has been given to us in these later times through our Lord
Jesus Christ. But there is a fresh difficulty which confronts us
now, even if it has not occurred to some of us already.
Granted that it is possible for us to make such inferences from
what we know about ourselves and about the nature of the
world around us, was it equally possible for man to do so long
centuries ago, when he was far less developed intellectually,
when all his mental energies were devoted to getting food and
dodging the wild beasts, and he had no time for speculative
thinking ? Even as things are, I felt that some of you were
looking a little blank when you were being confronted with
the argument from contingent being. And yet there is no-
body in this congregation who does not possess at least a rudi-
mentary aptitude for discursive thought. What would the
hairy Ainu make of it, or the South African bushman, if we
started talking to him about essence and existence? He would
be a non-starter, surely, from the first.

And yet, if primitive man was not in a position to form

27

28 In Soft Garments

some kind of ideas about God, and man's relation to God,
and man's duties in the sight of God, how are we to reconcile
that with the notion that all men are responsible to God for
their actions, and will be judged by him according to the
efforts they made to live according to his will? Had they
really any chance the people who died before any Christian
missionaries could get at them ? And if not, how do we recon-
cile that with the goodness or even with the justice of God?
Such questions agitated Catholic thinkers a good deal about a
hundred years ago ; naturally. Because it was about a hundred
years ago that people began to wake up to the fact that human
life on this planet went back a long way beyond the four
thousand years or so that Archbishop Ussher had allowed to
it. It was in 1825 that Kent's Cavern, near Torquay, was first
scientifically examined, and the theory brought forward that
the remains there proved the coexistence of man with animals
which were extinct before history began. As you probably
know, by an odd chance it was the local Catholic priest, a
certain Father McEnery, who gave this theory to the world,
and was immediately told that that was all nonsense ; it didn't
in the least agree with the best theories of the best people.
However, palaeontology got going, and it became generally
realized that for thousands of years before Moses there were
human beings going about the world who must, theo-
logically speaking, have had immortal souls. And two ways
were devised of explaining how these people might have had
a chance of knowing, and therefore of loving and worship-
ping God. One, which is properly described as Fideism, is to
suppose that every human soul has, if it will but enter into
itself, an intuitive knowledge of God's existence, just as every
soul has an intuitive power of distinguishing between right
and wrong ; that a kind of interior revelation is thus offered to
every soul, however deeply sunk in ignorance or heathenism.
The other, properly called Traditionalism, supposes that there

White-washing Caliban 29

has been, at all times, a tradition handed down from Adam to
his posterity ; instead of an individual revelation to each
human soul, you would thus have a common revelation made
once for all to the human race, which, although it has become
obscured at various times, and in various places, has never
been allowed to die out.

Both those doctrines were condemned by the Council of
the Vatican, not on their positive but on their negative side.
There is no reason why you should not believe, if you want
to believe, that every man born into the world is privileged
with a direct intuition of God's existence, although it does not
seem to be borne out much by our common experience. Nor
is there any reason why a continuous tradition on the subject
should not have existed from the time of the first human pair
right down to our own day, in some part of the world ; very
probably it has, although evidently it has been very much
overgrown with false beliefs. No, what the Church insists on
is this, that it is theoretically possible for any human being,
even at a low stage of development, to find out God for him-
self if he will use the natural gift of reason which God has
given him. Actually, in innumerable cases the traditions in
which he has been brought up, or the psychological influences
which have affected him, will make it almost impossible that
he should ; and we cannot but believe that God will judge, in
such cases, with a mercy proportionate to the lack of oppor-
tunity. But you mustn't say that the knowledge of God's
existence can only come to us through a revelation, public or
private ; that there is no other way in which such an idea
could ever have been entertained; that is heresy.

Meanwhile, I need hardly say that the question, "How does
maii come to entertain the idea of God?" has been discussed
for the last hundred years by people outside the Church from
a very different point of view. These people assume that God
does not exist, and having made that assumption they proceed

30 In Soft Garments

to consider how such an illusion can have arisen, on Aristotle's
principle that you should not be content with proving your
adversary to be in error ; you should find out the explanation
of how the error arose. And indeed most of the agnostic
writers you come across nowadays are so busy providing
explanations of how men came to believe in God, that they
omit altogether to consider whether his existence is or is not a
fact. Anthropologists have held various theories about the
origin of religion during this last century, and I haven't time
to distinguish them, but roughly you can say that the theory
which has most recently enjoyed popularity is this. In die first
instance, they say, primitive man has a sense of something
holy or something mysterious attaching to certain things ; he
believes in a kind of impersonal power which is connected
with particular spots or particular objects or particular occu-
pations. Then he begins to personify these spiritual influences
and give them names ; he comes to believe in die existence of
separate spirits, living spirits like himself, dwelling in or
behind certain objects his family hearth, for example, or his
fruit trees, or his cattle sheds. And then among these multi-
tudinous deities of his one comes to the front, achieves special
importance; perhaps first of all it is the earth-mother,
then it will be the sun-god, and last of all it will be the sky-
god, a being who lives right up above the clouds. And when
primitive man has got to that point he is in a position to drop
his belief in the other gods, as the Jews did when they came
out of Egypt, and become a monotheist. It's much more
complicated than that, but those are the broad outlines of
anthropological doctrine as it was till lately and as it is still in
the handbooks. And if you get into discussion with anybody
who has been reading anthropology he will feed that sort of
stuff to you.

When you asked these people how they knew that that was
the way in which theology developed, or how they knew that

White-washing Caliban 3 1

it had developed at all, you found the situation was rather
curious. They assumed that there had been a development,
because they were under the spell of evolutionary doctrine.
Some forms of culture, some religious ideas, some cere-
monies, appeared to them to be more complicated and there-
fore more highly developed than others ; therefore, they said,
these were later than the others, and the savage tribes among
whom they were found must be considered a later form of
civilization than those savage tribes in which they did not
appear. So, you see, they were cooking their facts all the time.
They would tell you that the sky-god only appeared in late
civilizations like the Yahoo, or whatever it might be ; and
when you looked back to an earlier page to find out why the
Yahoos were thought to be a late civilization, you found it
was because they believed in the sky-god. The whole thing
was theory, with no relation to ascertainable fact at all. One
man protested against this, a fellow-countryman of our own,
and one of the most interesting ; Andrew Lang. He kept on
pointing out the strong probability that they had got it all
the wrong way round ; that belief in a personal deity came
first, and that the other religious business, the myths and the
magic and the totems and all the rest of it, were developments
or degenerations which grew up later. And they all said, " Ah,
that paradoxical fellow Lang ! "What joke will he be springing
on us next?"

Then, just recently, Lang's protest has been taken up by a
very different kind of person; Dr Schmidt, a priest who used
to hold the chair of ethnology, I think it is, in Vienna uni-
versity. He was up here some years ago, giving some lectures
at Manchester, for he is a man of world-wide reputation, and
has been president of the ethnological congress and editor of
Anthropos, which is the trade organ of the anthropologists,
and I don't know what besides. And he started out on a quite

original plan. He would determine from other considerations,
>

32 In Soft Garments

from race, from geographical distribution, from the nature of
the implements they used and from their general standard of
culture, which of the savage tribes known to us were really
the earliest, the very very earliest. And then, having satisfied
himself about this, he would see whether these really primi-
tive tribes had or had not got the kind of religious attitude
which Tylor and Fraser and all the rest of them described as

<;>?

primitive.

I am simply boiling down for you this morning the sub-
stance of his book The Origin and Growth of Religion. He
draws up a list of the people, scattered about in odd comers of
the globe, who can be described as really primitive. One very
obvious test he applies, which narrows the range of candidates
considerably; Which are the Food-gatherers? The people,
that is, who have never, or never till demonstrably recent
times, cultivated the earth or raised cattle at all; who have
lived simply on what they could get by hunting and on the
fruits they could pick wild? And there are other tests, of
course the use of the bow, any at all developed use of
pottery, any power of working metals, everything like that
disqualifies a people from being thought of as really primitive.

He finds these primitive peoples, as I say, in odd pockets up
and down the world. He finds them in the south-east of
Australia, in Tierra del Fuego at the very south of the Ameri-
can Continent, among the pygmies in Africa, in the Andaman
Islands, among the Eskimos, in some California!! tribes of
North America, and so on. Of course, in many cases you find
that these people have taken over in part the ideas and the
habits of their slightly more civilized neighbours. But so far
as you can isolate their real native character, these tribes and a
few more give you a fairly consistent picture of what man-
kind must have been like before the fields were ever tilled, or
cattle were ever tamed, when only the rudest of tools and of
implements had even been invented.

White-washing Caliban 33

Observe that the very isolation of these peoples proves the
genuineness of their traditions. If, 2,000 years hence, some
ethnologist investigated the remains of England and proved
that whereas the vast bulk of its savage population wore
loin-cloths, but just in a few parts, in Cornwall and in the
Lakes and on the coast of Norfolk, men were found wearing
trousers, he would be perfectly justified in saying that the
common tradition of these few isolated districts, which had
no communication with each other, was unmistakable evi-
dence. It would mean that originally British people wore
trousers, and that loin-cloths, as worn in all the central part
of the island, were the innovation. So with these pygmies
and bushmen. Whatever culture they possess in common
they have not learned from one another; how could they,
scattered as they are? Therefore it is something that has come
down to them from days, long centuries ago, when they and
people like them populated the whole world. There's another
interesting point. Assuming and it seems all the evidence
we have justifies us in assuming that human life began in
and spread from Central Asia, you will see that these primi-
tive peoples have been driven, by the continuous pressure of
other civilizations more powerful than themselves, into the
remotest corners of the world ; just as the Celts of our own
island have been driven into the remotest corners of our own
island the highlands of Scodand, Wales, Cornwall. So you
find these people in the south of Australia, in the south of
Africa, in the south of America, in remote islands of the
Indian Ocean that lead nowhere, on the fringe of the Arctic
Circle, in the narrow strip of land that stretches along north-
ern America, shut off between the mountains and the sea.
You find the really primitive peoples where you would ex-
pect to find them, in the corners into which their conquerors
pushed them while the going was good.

Now, let me summarize quite briefly the findings of Dr

34 In Soft Garments

Schmidt about the religious ideas of these primitive peoples,
supported by a whole mass of evidence in a much longer book
which he is slowly bringing out. Not each point, of course, is
true about each tribe, but this is the general picture. All the
things we think of as very queer and primitive, totems, and
cannibalism, and earth-goddesses, and magic, and solar myths,
and the vegetation-spirit, and human sacrifice, and all the
things the anthropologists have been making such play with
this century past, are not really primitive at all. They are
later innovations, belonging to the ages when men tilled the
ground and shot beasts with arrows and grazed cattle and did
civilized things like that. Among the really primitive peoples
all the odd, fantastic elements of savage religion either don't
occur at all, or only occur here and there, in a half-hearted
way. Meanwhile, all these early peoples believe in one God.
Sometimes they have a collection of other deities, but always
there is one top god, so to speak, quite unmistakably superior
to anything else that exists in their thought. He lives in the
sky; he is the creator of everything in the world, and gener-
ally of the sky itself as well. Sometimes the existence of evil in
the world is attributed to a second being, the Coyote, for
example, of the American Indians ; but he is a sort of corner-
man, like Brer Fox in Uncle Remus, and he is always utterly
inferior to the Creator. The Creator is all good, and approves
of, indeed exacts, right behaviour among men. I may add that
among these primitives monogamy is very definitely the
rule. They pray to the Creator, though some of them more
than others ; there is an Arctic people with an unpronounce-
able name who say they do not pray much, because the
white people are always praying and it doesn't seem to them
much good. They offer sacrifices from their hunting, but
not human sacrifices at all The Creator is always personal ;
he is ordinarily represented as Omniscient, Omnipotent,
and Eternal. Now, all that is not really a bad morning's

White-washing Caliban 35

work for people who have never learned to shoot with a
bow or turn the earth with a plough. I daresay they would
not exactly follow an argument about essence and existence ;
but they have preserved, from an age long, long before
history began, the cult of a God who, in all essential features,
strongly resembles the God we Christians worship. I should
add that all these peoples without exception believe in
survival after death, and several of them in a world of
rewards and punishments hereafter.

Well, all this working back into the past is an uncertain
business, and lends itself to continual shifting between one
theory and another. I don't pretend that what Dr Schmidt
tells us is in any way final; he doesn't pretend it himself
But it is clear, I think, that just at the moment* the latest and
the most fruitful anthropological research is all on the side of
the angels. So that if you get into an argument which runs on
these lines, it will be a fairly safe way of closuring the
discussion to say, "I suppose you have read Dr Schmidt?"

* Written in 1932.

V

UNDER PONTIUS PILATE

E have been, talking about natural theology ;
that is, about the knowledge of God which
man can reach for himself, if he will trust his
own reason and his own conscience. The next
stage in apologetic is to establish, on historical
grounds, the fact that our Lord came to earth and that he
claimed to bring a fuller revelation from God ; the grounds,
too, on which he justified that claim.

First of all let's get this point clear that God wasn't bound
to reveal himself to man. In spite of our dual nature, in spite
of the Fall, man has got enough apparatus left to serve God,
if he wants to, without any direct supernatural assistance. His
reason will tell him that God exists, if he will only think. His
conscience will tell him that God ought to be obeyed, and, in
general outline, what are the laws which God wants him to
obey, if he will only listen to it. We believe, in fact, that it is
possible for a man brought up altogether remote from Chris-
tian influence and therefore, through no fault of his own, a
heathen or practically a heathen, to reach heaven if he will
make use of the actual graces God sends him, by being
sorry for his sins and so on. And we should have no
grievance against God, in strict justice at least, if all of us
were in the same position; if you and. I had never been
brought up in the Catholic faith, if (for that matter) there

had been no Catholic faith for us to be brought up in.

36

Under Pontius Pilate 37

That's all perfectly true, but it doesn't need a very profound
study of human nature to discover that most men, left to the
light of their natural reason and conscience, don't, at least to
all appearance, put up much of a show. The human reason is
curiously apt to get warped in such a way that it only diinks
what it wants to think ; the human conscience is even more
prone to accommodate itself, so that a man comes to approve
of himself for doing exactly the thing he wants to do. We
make exceptions ; we tell ourselves that circumstances alter
cases. Like the South Sea Islander, you remember, in Mark
Twain, who was very much impressed when he was told the
story of Cain and Abel, but when the missionary tried to
improve the occasion by going on to say that Cain was a
South Sea Islander, he rather altered his point of view, and
said, "What was Abel fooling around there for, anyway?"
I always like that phrase in the Imitation of Christ which
compares our natural reason to a spark left among the ashes
you know, that irritating bit of live coal which makes it look
as if it ought to be possible to get the fire going again by just
drawing it with a newspaper, but when you've tried it for
about half an hour you find that you have to ring for the
housemaid and get her to lay the fire afresh after all. That, as
we know, is what our Lord's Incarnation meant, the remaking
of our nature. And, so far as our reason is concerned, he did
that in the first place by making to us a revelation of the
Divine Nature ; by telling us and showing us more about God
than we knew, more than we ever could have known, by any
philosophical speculation.

More than we ever could have known whereas reason
merely teaches us that God is One, revelation informs us there
are three Persons in one Godhead; whereas the doctrine of
Purgatory was something the human reason might have
guessed at (and indeed, some of the pagans, notably Virgil,
made an uncommonly good shot at it) only revelation could

38 In Soft Garments

have established its truth, and so on. To bring us such infor-
mation, we need a Messenger from God ; an Ambassador, and
one who can present credentials to us, so that we can be sure
he comes from God. Remember, it is not logically necessary
for us, at this stage in apologetics, to prove that Jesus Christ
was the Son of God ; all we want to be sure of at this stage is
that he is God's Ambassador to man. Revelation might have
come to us through an angel ; might have come to us, even,
through the granting of special illumination to an ordinary
human being. That God's Ambassador should be God himself
is an extra, something we could not have claimed or coven-
anted for. But the Ambassador must have credentials; we
must be able to distinguish the revelation which he brings
from all the bogus revelations which are splashed across the
pages of history ; Mahomet with his book, Joanna Southcott
with her sealed box, Joseph Smith with his gold plates, and
so on. Nay, we must be able to distinguish it from merely
private revelations, such as those given to St Theresa and St
Margaret Mary, which, though we believe them to be divine
in their origin, were nevertheless private revelations, not im-
posing belief on anybody except the persons themselves to
whom they were made. There must be evidence for all to see.
That I think you can say it without irreverence is the
minimum we could be satisfied with, if we were to have a
revelation at all. But there are plenty of people you will
probably have come across them among those fellow-students
of yours with whom you conduct theological arguments at
about two o'clock in the morning who say they want more
than that. They say, for example, if God really meant to
reveal himself, in this solemn and convincing way, to man-
kind, why should that revelation come to mankind at a par-
ticular point in the history of our race ? Why should God's
Ambassador only appear on earth for a matter of thirty years,
exercise his" preaching ministry only over the space of a short

Under Pontius Pilate 39

three years, and that such a very long rime ago? Or alter-
natively, if it was to happen at one particular point in time,
why couldn't it have happened in our own day, or some-
where rather nearer our own day, so that it could have been
verified by more trained observation, and enshrined in more
accurate records ?

Well, the immediate answer to that is quite a simple one
that since, as we have seen, revelation is not something to
which we could have laid claim as a right, a fortiori we have
no right to say we want a revelation of this or that kind, in
excess of the bare logical minimum. To be sure, a revelation
which was incapable of producing conviction would be
almost worse than nothing ; it would be a continual worry to
us without in any way enabling us to make up our minds.
But to say that we will not look at any revelation which does
not come to us with headlines, so to speak, all across the page,
shouting its message at us, compelling attention and forcing
conviction on us that would be presumptuous, seeing what
we are. Beggars, after all, cannot be choosers.

And although we have very limited opportunities of
understanding the principles on which God acts in his dealings
with us, this at least seems certain from all we know of his
operations, that he doesn't work miracles unnecessarily. He
practises a kind of economy, raising up a saint only here and
there, granting a great deliverance only now and again,
working according to the laws which govern his natural
creation for the most part, and only superseding them within
narrow limits. He might, I suppose, have arranged that every
Pope should start performing miracles immediately upon his
election, and marked out the Holy See in that way as the in-
fallible oracle for the solution of all our difficulties. But, as
far as we can see, that is not God's way ; that's all there is to
be said about it. He won't make things TOO easy for us, in
this world of our probation ; won't lavish his supernatural

40 In Soft Garments

favours in a degree which might make them become cheap
and stale to us. He preferred to concentrate our attention on a
particular historical figure ; a Man as we ourselves are men.
He preferred to let the supernatural world break through
into ours at a particular period in time, as we men are
bounded and conditioned by periods of time. We were to
live by faith ; deriving from the very obscurity in which faith
works the opportunity for showing our loyalty to him,
believing where we have not seen.

Meanwhile, we must think twice before we quarrel with
the particular period of time which he chose for that Divine
event. It's perfectly true, of course, that in our day we have
much more apparatus for recording events than the human
race had nineteen hundred years ago. If some doubt should
arise, years hence, about the exact circumstances of King
George's funeral, it would be possible, I suppose, to turn up
all sorts of films and gramophone records, and the files of
innumerable papers, so that all controversy could be set at
rest. And in the same way, any alleged miracle at Lourdes
can be tested by the doctors there far more accurately than
our Lord's miracles were in his day. But then, in the first
place, you can't be certain that if the Church hadn't been
there to revive the tradition of learning when the barbarians
came, the achievements of modern science would have been
possible. And further, when you complain in this way that
Almighty God was in too much of a hurry to reveal himself,
you forget that there are plenty of people who make precisely
the opposite complaint, and ask why he did not reveal him-
self sooner. Why all those thousands of years between the Fall
and the Incarnation? Why must Abraham, and Moses, and
David, why must Confucius, and Buddha, aad Socrates, live
and die without having the chance of gaining that enlighten-
ment which our Lord came to bring ?

After all, the world at large had been prepared, in a very

Under Pontius Pilate 41

special way, for our Lord's coming. And that applies, not
only to the conditions of human thought, but to the ordinary
conditions of life as well. The known world, for practical
purposes, united tinder a single Government; a common
language, the Greek language, and a common civilization, the
Greek civilization, spread in every part of it ; an admirable
system of roads for transport ; great facility in writing, and in
the copying of manuscripts ; a quite unexampled interval of
peace, in the East especially after all, if our Lord had come
seventy years earlier he would have found Jerusalem being
captured by Pompey, if he had come seventy years later he
would have found it being destroyed by Titus. All those
conditions, you will see for yourself, were perfect conditions
as far as they went for the diffusion of a new world-idea.
Virgil's fourth eclogue shows that the world was ready for it,
just when the Jewish people, with the prophecy of Daniel
in its hands, was full of expectation that the long-promised
deliverance would be accomplished.

But there's another difficulty which is sometimes expressed,
and perhaps felt more often than it is expressed ; I mean the
question why our Lord, granted that he preferred to come at
the time when he came, should have come to Palestine, rather
than to some more fashionable and influential part of the
world. We all know, I hope, that there is a devotional mean-
ing in our Lord's choice of obscure surroundings when he
catne to earth. But that doesn't concern us this morning ; we
are dealing with the question as a matter of apologetics. Was
Palestine, we ask, the right centre for the diffusion of a world-
idea, at a moment when the Roman Empire was at its zenith,
and nothing that happened outside Rome could really rivet
the attention of mankind?

The answer is that it was. The Jewish people was, and is,
unique. The Jews alone in the ancient world had preserved
the tradition that there is one true God. Oh, I know they were

42 In Soft Garments

always falling short of that standard, and relapsing into
idolatry; but they always came back to their origins, drove
out the false idea, and confessed their shortcomings. And if
they were unique in their faith, they were unique also in their
hope. Alone among the nations of the world, they looked
forward to the future instead of looking back to the past ;
the expected coming of a Redeemer was an integral part of
the philosophy by which they lived. That faith and that hope
combined with, and helped to form, an intensely nationalistic
feeling among them which made it impossible, and (some
would say) still makes it impossible to merge them in the
common stock of mankind. Ask yourself what an ancient
Roman or an ancient Greek, a Babylonian or an Assyrian
looked like, and you will have to go to the sculptures in a
museum to find out. Ask yourself what an ancient Jew looked
like, and you have only got to go to the jeweller's round the
corner. They preserved then, as they preserve now, their
obstinate nationality.

And, with these characteristics, then as now, they were
scattered over the face of die earth. "There were, dwelling
in Jerusalem, Jews, devout men, from every nation under
heaven, " so the Acts of the Apostles describe the day of Pente-
cost, and it was true ; since the captivity in Babylon, they had
spread everywhere. I shouldn't wonder if there were as many
Jews, then, in the single city of Alexandria, as there are in
Great Britain to-day. And they kept up communications with
one another; you can see that all over the Acts, all over St
Paul's epistles. Well, I won't say that that made the preaching
of the Gospel easier; as we know, in many cases it was the
Jews who were, at first, the chief enemies of the new religion.
But it made it certain that the Christian claim would be
discussed everywhere, that the Christian missionaries would
be known everywhere. If our Lord had come to Rome in-
stead of Palestine, to Rome, that Babylon of strange creeds

Under Pontius Pilate 43

and shifting opinions, humanly speaking his career would
have been a nine days' wonder. In coming to Palestine, he
struck at the religious nerve-centre of the human race.

In saying all that, I haven't been trying to establish the
truth of the Christian revelation. The fact that it came into
the world at a moment, and in circumstances, which favoured
its rapid diffusion is not, so far, evidence that it was true. No,
this morning I've only been attempting to deal with a negative
objection the objection that there is no need to pay any
attention to the Christian claim, because the events which
tend to substantiate it happened in such a hole-and-corner
way, happened such a long time ago. I've been trying to show
that that criticism at any rate is shallow and ill-founded, if only
you will take an unprejudiced view of history.

And there's one thing that's worth adding about the records
themselves ; I mean, those New Testament documents to
which, treated merely as historical documents, our apologetic
makes its appeal. They are historical records, of unusual value.
The manuscripts themselves are very much nearer in date
to their originals than most manuscripts which deal with the
events of the ancient world. When you are dealing with the
secular events of the same period, your chief authority is the
Annals of Tacitus. And the oldest MS. we possess of Tacitus'
Annals comes down to us from the tenth, or just possibly the
ninth century. But the Codex Sinaiticus, about which we all
heard so much when it was bought for the nation a few years
ago, dates from the fourth century ; and we have other MSS.
of the same or nearly the same date. I was told the other day
that they have now found a MS. of some of St Paul's epistles
which goes back a whole century behind Sinaiticus. And, of
course, there are the papyrus fragments, still earlier, and the
quotations in the fathers, which help us to determine the
exact state of the text. And the Gospel records themselves are,
or purport to be, sober historical records, not high-flown

44 In Soft Garments

poetry like the early records of most other religions. The first
tforee Gospels, whatever may be said of the fourth, were
certainly written within the lifetime of many people who had
witnessed the events they record, and were in a position to
contradict their statements if they had a mind to. There is no
reason to quarrel with them, merely as records, any more
than with die commentaries of Caesar, or the life of Tiberius
which was written by Velleius Paterculus. Whatever infer-
ences you draw from their contents, you cannot, without
forfeiting your claim to be regarded as a serious critic, treat
them otherwise than as history.

And I say we are going to treat them merely as history.
Don't ever allow yourself to be taken in by that stale old piece
of slander, that we Catholics first give the authority of the
Church as our ground for believing that the Bible is free from
error, and then give the inerrancy of the Bible as our ground
for believing in the authority of the Church. Of course, we do
nothing of the kind. At this stage in the argument, we know
nothing about the Bible being free from error ; we are pre-
pared to allow for the possibility (because the other man re-
gards it as a possibility) that the Gospel record distorts,
exaggerates, or even invents some of the facts. We are going
to come to the Gospel narrative as if for the first time, with-
out any prejudice or prepossession in its favour, and simply
ask ourselves, What did the Hero of this narrative claim to
be? And what proof did he offer us that this claim of his was
justified?

VI

THE CLAIM

"E are to examine the question, what it was
that our Lord claimed to be. The evidence we
shall use is that of the Gospels, used simply as
historical documents compiled by people who
lived within a short lifetime of the events. I
shall not use the fourth Gospel, because, as you will know if
you read the letters in The Times, a lot of fantastic stuff is still
talked about the date and authorship of that Gospel, so that if
I used it I might seem to be begging the question. I say, "what
our Lord claimed to be," namely, the Son of God in a unique
sense. I do not intend to prove, what revelation itself teaches
us, that he was the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, that
he united a human with a divine Nature under one Person, or
that he came to make atonement for our sins. All that is beside
our present point; our present business is to determine
whether he claimed to be a fully-accredited ambassador from
Almighty God, revealing the things of God to us ; and that
will be sufficiently established if we prove that he claimed to
be the Son of God in a sense so intimate that it is impossible
for any creature to share that title with him. If we prove that
he claimed to be the Son of God, that does not as yet prove
that he was. We have still to reckon with the possibility
that he was deceived, or that he was deceiving us. We
shall not have eliminated those possibilities until we have
considered what credentials he offers for our inspection,

45

46 In Soft Garments

when he asks us to believe that his account of his own nature
is true.

First, let us get this clear that our Lord's identity was a
mystery, to the men of his time no less than to those his-
torians, not of our faith, who haye written about his life since.
And it was a mystery, you may say, of his own making.
There was no doubt at all that he behaved and spoke like a
prophet, to say the very least. He didn't set out to be a
philosopher, appealing to human reason. Nor yet did he set
out to be one of the scribes, that is one of the doctors of the
Jewish church, handing on the tradition of the elders. He
corrected the tradition of the elders ; he was always saying
" Moses told you this, but I tell you that," and when you
think what the ipse dixit of Moses was and still is among the
Jews you will realize what a break with tradition that was.
One of the first impressions he made upon his audiences was
that he taught them as one having authority, and not as their
scribes. What sort of authority could that be? To the Jewish
mind there was an obvious answer, he must be a prophet, like
one of the Old Testament prophets. But, here again, he was a
puzzle. The Old Testament prophets had never spoken in
their own name. They always began dieir utterances with
the rubric, "Thus saith the Lord"; or they would describe
how they had seen a vision, how the Lord God of hosts had
spoken to them, and how he had sent them to deliver a
message from him. In our Lord's preaching there was never
a word of all that. He spoke as one having authority, but the
authority seemed somehow to belong to him personally, he
never referred the credit of it elsewhere. And as he spoke, so
he acted ; he told devils to go out of men who were possessed
without adjuring them by the name of God ; he forgave sins,
although the forgiveness of sins belonged to God only ; he
dispensed people from keeping the Sabbath; he cast the
merchants out of the temple; he came into Jerusalem riding

The Claim 47

on an ass, in evident reference to an old prophecy which was
always interpreted as describing the Messiah who was to
come. He behaved, not as a prophet, but as something more
than a prophet.

And all the time he keeps a finger on his lips. Everybody is
asking, "Who is this? Isn't he the son of a carpenter? How
did he learn letters? Can it be Elias come back to earth? Or
one of the old prophets? Or is it a new prophet like them?"
And he will not let any clue be given to the answer. When
sick and blind are cured at his word, he charges them to tell
no man ; when the devils cry out that he is the Son of God, he
solemnly adjures them to hold their peace. When he is asked
by what authority he does these things, he puts off his
questioners by asking them what they think about his pre-
decessor, St John the Baptist ; and they can say nothing, for
they know that St John the Baptist pointed them to one who
was even greater than himself. Again and again they test him
with hard problems, to see if he will give away his secret, but
always there is the same patient smile, the same impenetrable
air of mystery.

Now, even if we had nothing more to go upon, this secrecy
observed by our Lord would in itself be significant. I mean,
people don't ordinarily bother about secrecy unless they have
a secret to be kept. If you gave half a crown to a beggar, and
he said, " God bless you, sir, you must be a saint," you would
laugh and tell him not to be a fool. You wouldn't say, * ' Hush,
don't mention it to anybody." If you were a government
servant in Nigeria, and somebody asked you what authority
you had to take taxes off him, you wouldn't ask him a riddle,
and then when he gave it up say, "Well, I shan't tell you what
authority I have to collect taxes either" ; you would refer him
to the Colonial Office. How you explain this policy on our
Lord's part doesn't, for our present purposes, matter. I
suppose the ordinary account we should give of it is that our

48 In Soft Garments

Lord did not want to put the faith of his contemporaries to
too sudden a strain ; he wanted to give them every chance of
guessing who he was by gradually revealing himself, and
didn't tell them in so many words until he saw that the right
moment had come for it. But we aren't concerned with the
explanation, only with the fact. And the fact of our Lord's
silence about the origin of his mission seems to me enor-
mously significant; if he had been an ordinary Rabbi, why
not say he was a Rabbi ? If he thought he was a prophet, why
not say he was a prophet? A secret that is worth keeping has
got to be a secret which is going to cause a sensation when
it is found out

However, our Lord wasn't content with mere silence. If
you read the Gospels with a little attention, you will find that
he was dropping out hints all the time, such as would lead on
those who heard him to the conclusion that he was an ambas-
sador from God, without saying so in so many words. Take,
for example, his constant use of the title "Son of Man." It
was probably a tide connected in Jewish minds with the idea
of the Messiah; and he himself talks freely about the day
when the Son of Man will come in judgment. But I think he
showed a preference for that title just because it emphasized
his humanity ; and what was die point of emphasizing his
humanity unless he were something more than an ordinary
human being? When Socrates assured his contemporaries
that he really knew nothing, and was only asking questions
because he wanted to learn from men wiser than himself, you
can see at once he knew he was cleverer than they were. If you
knew nothing about the Pope except that he called himself
the skve of die slaves of God, you could infer quite easily
that he regarded himself as the top man in Christendom, or he
wouldn't have used such terms in describing himself. In the
same way, you can give a good guess that our Lord wouldn t
have been at such pains to call himself the Son of Man if he

The Claim 49

had not claimed to be something more than man when he did
so.

Or again, take the way in which he refers to Almighty
God. He very seldom talked about "God" less than two
dozen times altogether. What he does talk about is "the
Father." And when we pray, he tells us that we are to begin
our prayer with the phrase " Our Father." But how often do
you find that phrase on his own lips? Never. He talks about
"my Father" again and again; he talks about "your Father"
again and again. But he never couples the two ideas together
and talks about "our Father" why? Because, clearly, he
himself is the Son of God in one sense, those to whom he is
speaking are sons of God in another. That is the sort of evi-
dence which is all the more valuable because it is so unlikely
that the evangelists all four evangelists should have ob-
served that principle in all their records of our Lord's
utterances, if they were not preserving an authentic tradition.
How easy to have slipped into the phrase "our Father who is
in heaven" accidentally, if they had been writing down
legends !

The hints I have mentioned are negative ones ; there are
positive hints too. For example, when our Lord asks the
Pharisees how the Messiah can be the Son of David, and yet
David can call him "Lord," on the face of it he is just setting
them a Rabbinical puzzle, but it's not hard to see that he is
really challenging them to make up their minds about his
own position. Or when Peter is asked whether he and his
Master pay tribute, you remember the question our Lord puts
to him, "From whom do earthly kings take tribute? From
their own sons, or from strangers? From strangers very
well, then, the sons are free." But Peter will find the required
coin in the mouth of the first fish which comes to his hook;
"that take, and give it for me and for thee" not "for us,"
but "for thee and for me" ; for yourself, who can be expected

50 In Soft Garments

to pay tribute, and for me, who owe nothing, because I am
the Son of that God in whose honour the temple stands.

And the strongest hint of all, perhaps, was the parable of
the Husbandmen, which comes at the very end of his
ministry, just before the Passion, when the rulers of the Jews
had already made up their minds to do away with him. The
man who planted a vineyard was Almighty God, the husband-
men to whom he gave charge of it were the Jews themselves ;
so much they must have recognized immediately, for it was a
figure familiar to them from their reading of the prophets.
And it cannot have been difficult for them to recognize the
way in which their fathers had treated the prophets, when
they heard of the king's messengers being thrown out of the
vineyard and put to death. "Last of all he sent unto them his
son, for he said, They will reverence my son. But they said
within themselves, This is the heir ; come, let us kill him, that
the inheritance may be ours." Imagine the feelings of a Phari-
see listening to that parable! Could he have any doubt at all
that the man who spoke diose words was making himself the
Son of God?

But even that, you see, was only a hint ; there was nothing
actionable about it; as far as we know, it was not even
brought up at his trial. Were there no occasions, then, on
which our Lord broke through this self-imposed silence and
told men openly what he claimed to be? Yes, he did do that
sometimes, and on three occasions specially. They are all
familiar ones, but you will forgive me if I run through them
this morning just to show you how definitely they complete
the catena of evidence which we have been discussing. The
first was when he had sent out his seventy disciples to preach,
and they returned to tell him of the success of their mission.
He does not speak to them ; rather, it seems, he allows them to
overhear him conversing with his heavenly Father. U O
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, thou hast hid these things

The Claim 51

from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to little
ones. Yea, Father, for so it hath seemed good in thy sight.'*
And then, as if suddenly conscious that he has a human audi-
ence, he explains what his position is. "All things are deli-
vered to me by my Father. And no one knoweth the Son, but
the Father, neither doth anyone know the father but the son
and he to whom it shall please the son to reveal him."

That, you see, is the exact statement we were waiting for.
All things are delivered to me by my Father a bad transla-
tion, as you so often get in our English Bible. Omnia mihi
tradita sunt, all things have been handed on to me there has
been a paradosis, a traditio, from Father to Son. Just as some
secret of family importance may be revealed to the heir by
his father when he comes of age, so our Lord, incarnate on
earth, has received from his heavenly Father a tradition which
he is in a position to hand on to others, his earthly friends.
And he intends to do so ; no one knoweth the Father except
the Son and he to whom it shall please the Son to reveal him
it is a revelation, in fact, which our Lord brings to men ; a
revelation about God ; a revelation which none but he could
make fully, since none but he knows the Father with the
knowledge of perfect intimacy.

The second passage is too well known to need quoting at
length; it is when, at Caesarea Philippi, our Lord asks his
apostles what is the current opinion of men about him; and
when these have been mentioned, he asks what is their opinion
of him. And Peter answers, Thou art the Christ, the Son of
the living God. "Blessed art thou, Simon son of John," our
Lord says, "because flesh and blood [that is, human wisdom]
hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in
heaven." This is the completion, you see, of the passage
we have just been discussing; no one knows the Father,
except through revelation from the Son; and nobody, it
seems, knows the Son except through revelation from the

52 In Soft Garments

Father like Peter, who is to be the rock of the new covenant.
But the important thing is that here our Lord, although he
forbids his apostles to tell what they have heard, does never-
theless accept, formally, the title of Messiah, and there is no
secrecy between him and his friends about it any longer.

Was it only to his friends, then, that he admitted who he
was? No, to his enemies too; but only when their agreed
determination to crucify him had made it unnecessary to
spare their feelings any longer. The high priest, at his trial,
adjures him by the divine name to say whether or no he is
the Christ, the Son of the living God. And he answers openly,
"I am." Now, observe how impossible it is to take this as
anything but a confession of his most intimate convictions
about himself. He was on oath ; to accept the statement in
any false sense was perjury. He was being tried for his life,
and the answer he gave meant certain death ; he could have
saved himself by withholding it. They were plunging into the
guilt of shedding innocent blood; and he was abetting them,
if he accepted the title loosely, recklessly, without supplying
necessary qualifications. If, then, when he called himself the
Son of God, he meant no more than that he was a man like
themselves, but distinguished from themselves by the enjoy-
ment, in a unique degree, of prophetic gifts, why did he not
say so ? Is it credible that he should not have said so, when he
knew that the alternative was a charge of blasphemy from
which he could not defend himself?

Well, I haven't nearly been able to exhaust the arguments
it would be possible to bring forward on this subject. I
haven't said anything, for example, about the way in which
our Lord habitually talks of the supernatural world as if he
were familiar with all its details how 'he seems to know all
about God's methods in the ordering of Providence, all about
the holy angels and the service they do, about the devils and
the power they have, about the circumstances of the last

The Claim 53

judgment, and the conditions of life in a future state. And all
that, mark you, without ever quoting his authority for the
statements he makes ; simply letting drop these references to
the unseen world as it were absent-mindedly, as if he didn't
realize that people might turn upon him and ask him the
question, "How do you know?" That attitude, as an ordin-
ary matter of human psychology, is not the common attitude
of the impostor ; the impostor is always on the look-out for
such criticisms, and careful to explain what the source of his
knowledge was. It is not altogether unlike the attitude of a
lunatic, suffering from hallucinations ; but again, as a matter
of abnormal human psychology, you would expect such a
lunatic to be continually dwelling on his obsessions, never
able to talk about anything else ; whereas in our Lord's teach-
ing these references are only occasional, only incidental.

I've been trying to show that our Lord did claim to bring
with him a unique revelation from God not merely a new
moral code, but the foundations of a theological certitude
which previous ages had never even aspired to. And that is
the conclusion which would, I think, be reached by any
impartial critic approaching the documents for the first time.
The reason why many non-Catholic writers, especially of the
older generation, are blind to all that, don't recognize the far-
reaching nature of our Lord's claims, is because they shrink
from the corollaries which such a recognition would involve.
They shrink, through a kind of rationalist prejudice, from
having to admit that our Lord was, in a unique sense, the
Son of God. They shrink, through a kind of sentimental
reverence, from having to admit that one whose career has
had so profound an influence on history was an impostor or
a madman. But it is a mark of intellectual cowardice, to
shrink from corollaries. God wouldn't have given us an intel-
lect, if he didn't want us to think straight.

VII
EARLY IN THE MORNING

JOUT the year A.D. 60, a prisoner stood
before the tribunal of Porcius Festus, the
Roman governor of Judaea. By the side of
Festus sat Kong Herod Agrippa the Second, a
subject prince who governed most of the
country to the north and east of Judaea. And the prisoner,
in the course of his statement, referred to the remarkable
fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy which took place
when a man in Jerusalem rose from the dead, about twenty-
seven years before. Festus, a newcomer to the province, said,
"My dear fellow, you must be mad." And the prisoner, St
Paul, turned to King Herod, and said, "The king here knows
that I'm talking sense when I say that. For I am persuaded that
these things are not hidden from him. For these things were
not done in a corner." Herod was not an old man, only
about thirty-three, and the event in question belonged to the
time when he was about six. St Paul appeals, either to his
boyish memories of what he heard at the time, or to the
tradition of local history in which he was brought up. In
either case, he treats the Resurrection of our Lord as a
known fact* All he labours to show is that the fact proves
our Lord's Divinity.

Yes, you say, but twenty-seven years is rather a long time-
lag, and the stories one hears in the nursery are sometimes
rather exaggerated. Very well, then, let us go back to an

54

Early in the Morning 55

earlier scene, also recorded in the Acts of the Apostles ; and to
a speech, made this time by St Peter those speeches in the
Acts, nearly any critic will agree, have the stamp of authen-
ticity about them, even if they were only written up after-
wards from notes. It was the Day of Pentecost, a great feast of
the Jews ; and St Peter stood in the street addressing a crowd
of Jews who had come there to worship) many from foreign
parts, but the bulk of them, we must suppose, residents in the
city itself. He recalls to them a passage in the Psalms, where
David says, "Thou, O God, wilt not leave my soul in hell,
neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption."
Who, he asks, is this Holy One referred to ? King David him-
self? No, King David did see corruption ; we all know where
his tomb is. Therefore it must refer to Jesus of Nazareth, who
rose from the grave and did not see corruption. Now, St
Peter was talking exactly fifty days after the alleged event.
The tomb of Jesus Christ was there, close to Jerusalem ; about
as far off, say, as Somerville is from here. And he challenges
them to go and look for the Body of Jesus of Nazareth there.
Or rather, he doesn't, because the mystery of its disappear-
ance is on all men's lips. He does not prove the doctrine of the
Empty Tomb ; he refers to it as a fact and bases his whole
argument on it. No ; these things were not done in a corner.
"What had happened ?

On either March 20 or March 27, rather more than nine-
teen hundred years ago, it seems that a handful of soldiers,
probably Roman soldiers, were on guard outside a tomb on
the outskirts of Jerusalem. The tomb was freshly made, but
it had been diverted from its original purpose, whatever that
was. The body of a Galilean Teacher, who had been crucified
by the Roman governor's orders, had been hastily put there
two days before. No more elaborate funeral had been possible
at the time, because it was the Paschal sabbath, and no manual
work might be done. Two Jewish gentlemen had carried out

56 In Soft Garments

this burial, apparently by themselves ; but their action had been
witnessed by some women, who were followers of the dead
Prophet. A very heavy stone had been rolled against the door
of the tomb, which was carved out of the natural rock; a
stone light enough for two men to put in position, but too
heavy for five women to move out of its position again. It
was a natural precaution, at a time and in a country where
robbing of graves was not unknown. But the soldiers were
posted there as a very special precaution ; because some words
used by the dead man, not long before, had suggested to the
authorities that he believed himself capable of rising again
from the tomb.

As events turned out, the precaution was of no great value.
Early in the morning an earthquake shock, the second in two
days, was felt in Jerusalem ; and it may be that, through some
fault in the ground, it was felt with especial violence just
where the tomb was. (We read in the papers last week that
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, raised long afterwards on
this site, has just been closed for repairs, because an earth-
quake which took place last October has damaged the struc-
ture.) The soldiers came back to the city in alarm; and some
of them made a report to those who had given them their
orders. The report was, that when the shock was felt the stone
had rolled away from the door of the sepulchre, and aa angel
had appeared to them, sitting on the stone, dazzling white in
the uncertain light of very early dawn. We do not know
whether the Jewish authorities believed this story ; but they
held it was the part of prudence to hush the matter up, and
bribed the soldiers to say that they had fallen asleep, and that
while they were asleep the body of the Galilean prophet had
been stolen away by his disciples. It has been pointed out long
ago that their story was not very cleverly concocted; for if
the soldiers were really asleep, how could they tell who had
stolen the body, or whether it had been stolen at all? But it

Early in the Morning 57

was the best that could be managed ; and this story was still
current among the Jews, it appears, years afterwards. The
gospel which tells us all this was probably, unlike the other
gospels, written in Judaea ; and it may well have preserved the
inner history, long kept secret, of what the soldiers saw, and
why, at dawn, the tomb was left unguarded.

Unguarded it evidently was. It must have been quite soon
after the soldiers left that some five women came to visit the
tomb and anoint the body, a tribute which they had not been
able to pay on the Friday evening. It was still dark, but only
with the dusk of twilight ; they would not have left the city in
pitch darkness. They were expecting to have difficulty about
moving the stone ; and their first surprise was when they, too,
found it rolled away from its place. One of the women, and
perhaps the most active spirit among them, she whom we call
Mary Magdalen, was so much excited or alarmed by this that
she went back at once to report the occurrence to the dead
man's disciples. The rest of the women, however, remained
at the tomb, and saw very much more. What was it they
saw?

They reported afterwards, like the soldiers, that they had
had a "vision of angels." Two men stood by them in shining
garments and, this time, had speech with them. To be more
accurate, it looks as if one of the two had been outside the
tomb, where the soldiers had seen him earlier, while the other
was inside, and not visible till you had entered. The evidence
on these points of detail is not exactly clear. True evidence
very seldom is. Bribe a handful of soldiers, and they will
spread the same lie all over Jerusalem. Take three women to
die tomb, none of them expecting to find anything unusual,
and you will have to piece the story together for yourself.
One will have seen two angels, another can only swear to the
presence of a single angel; this witness was conscious of the
angel first and the empty tomb afterwards, that one will have

58 In Soft Garments

got the order of her impressions confused. But their evidence
is quite clear in its main outlines ; whether of their own accord
or because the angels invited them to do so, they went into
the tomb, looked for the body, and found that it was not
there.

The angels had given them a message ; they were to tell the
disciples of the dead Prophet that he had risen from the dead,
and that they were to go back to Galilee, the part of the
country to which they belonged ; there, far away from the
scene of these recent disturbances, they would meet him
again. The women hastened away on this errand, and said
nothing to anybody on the way. Why is this detail men-
tioned? Probably because, on the way, they met two of the
disciples in question, without accosting them. By now, you
see, Mary Magdalen will have reached Jerusalem, with her
story that the grave-door was lying open so far, that is all
the news she has. Two of the disciples, Peter and John, set out,
running, to verify the truth of her statement; their first
thought may have been that the tomb had been robbed. But
if they passed, on their way, the rest of the women, no con-
versation was exchanged between them; that is the point.
They came to the sepulchre not knowing what they were
to find there, except that the stone would be rolled away.
Mary Magdalen followed the two disciples, presumably at a
distance.

One of the two disciples, John, has left us his own story of
the event. Both he and Peter went into the tomb, and verified
the absence of the body. They noticed something else ; still
more remarkable. The body had been wrapped in a winding-
sheet, and a napkin had been wound round the head. These
were found, apparently, still in position, as if the body had
passed through them without disturbing them. John tells us
that the sight was enough to carry conviction to his own
mind ; from that moment he believed that he who was dead

Early in the Morning 59

had risen again. No angels appeared to them, and they went
back as they had come.

So far, it will be noticed, die direct evidence about die body
of Jesus of Nazareth is purely negative; you have the con-
sistent story of a disappearance, but no story of an appear-
ance. And so far, it is well to observe, the evidence never
seems to have been refuted, or even contradicted. We have
seen what was the official story put about in Jerusalem ; it
tried to provide an explanation of the disappearance, as if the
fact were beyond denial. So it was that, fifty days afterwards,
one of the dead man's disciples made a speech before a large
crowd of people in Jerusalem itself, and treated the fact of the
empty tomb as a generally admitted fact on which you could
base your arguments. And years later, Paul of Tarsus, on his
trial before King Herod Agrippa, shows the same confidence.
He is persuaded, he says, that the events about which he has
been talking they included the Resurrection are well
known to the king; "for these things were not done in a
corner."

But we hear no more in our records about the negative
evidence, because at this point the positive evidence begins.
Mary Magdalen stood by the tomb weeping after the two
disciples had gone ; weeping, because she evidently thought
that somebody had taken her Master's body away. It might
be the authorities, it might be his enemies, it might be
common robbers it did not matter to her. She has come out
with her ointments to do honour to the dead man's memory,
and now it is too late; that is all she thinks about. She looks
into the tomb (for the first time, apparently), and sees an
angel sitting there, as the other women had, some minutes
back. Before she has time to answer the angel's mysterious
greeting, a shadow (I suppose) passes over the door ; she looks
round, and sees somebody standing beside her. Perhaps it will
be the gardener; she will ask if he knows anything about her

60 In Soft Garments

loss. And the rest of the story is told in two words of dia-
logue: "Mary . . . Master!" In such a short compass is the
script of the world's greatest drama comprised.

The other women will by now have been on their return
journey to the tomb, after delivering their message. Perhaps
by this time they had rejoined Mary Magdalen, and shared
her experience ; if not, it must have been soon afterwards
that they, too, met their risen Master and clung to his feet.
These first rumours of an appearance were not believed by
the other disciples, who waited for confirmation of the news.
And it was not till the evening or late afternoon that it came.
The dead Prophet appeared, living, to Peter, that one of his
disciples whom he had appointed to be the leader of the
others, strengthening their faith. Curiously, no details have
been preserved to us of this interview. But Peter described it,
fourteen or fifteen years afterwards, to Paul of Tarsus ; and
Paul of Tarsus, writing ten years later again to the Christians
in Corinth, refers to it as if it were an important plank in the
platform he used, when he preached the Gospel message.

It must have been shortly before or shortly after this that he,
whose body men looked for vainly in the sepulchre, appeared
again to two of his followers, as they were walking out to a
village seven or eight miles from Jerusalem. For whatever
reason, they did not recognize him till die very last moment,
although he walked for some way with them and shared their
evening meal. Like Mary Magdalen, diey found a difficulty
in recognizing him. Why, we do not know ; but do not let
us be told that the appearance was, therefore, a hallucination.
It was as far as possible the exact opposite. A hallucination
makes us mistake a stranger for a friend; this inhibition of
which we are speaking, whatever it was, made people mis-
take, at first, their Friend for a stranger. The two disciples
went back to Jerusalem to the upper room in which, as usual,
die followers of the Crucified were assembled; the doors

Early in the Morning 61

were locked, for fear of hostile action by the Jewish, authori-
ties. While they were describing their experience, the Master
himself appeared suddenly in their midst ; quieted their fears ;
ate and drank with them to convince them that it was no
mere phantom shape they saw.

Those are the events of the first Easter Day, collected from
six different sources, of which all except one seem to have
been compiled in their present shape within forty years of the
events which they described. What are we going to make of
them? We are the jury, as it were, which must sit in inquest,
age after age, on the events recorded ; and yet, are we the jury,
or is it we who are on our trial? Anyhow, the Christian sub-
mission is this that the events I have described, coupled with
a set of similar events spread over a period of forty days,
coupled with the inferences which we may draw from the
behaviour of the dead Prophet's followers, immediately after-
wards, coupled with a living tradition which has been handed
down, from that century to this, by a body of men singularly
tenacious of tradition, establishes the supernatural character of
the Mission with which Jesus of Nazareth went about the
world nineteen hundred years ago. If you dissent from that
finding, then it is for you to decide at what point you will
dissent from it. Will you doubt the authenticity of the
documents? Or the veracity of their authors? Or the good
faith of the witnesses on whom those authors relied? Or,
if you do not doubt the facts themselves, will you doubt
the philosophical construction which has been put upon the
facts?

I cannot try to meet all those positions. I am only concerned
now to challenge one of them ; to meet the contentions of the
people who say, "Oh, yes, there is no doubt the documents
are authentic ; no doubt that those who compiled them were,
in the main, conscientious ; no doubt that the witnesses on
whom they depended, simple people and evidently people of

62 In Soft Garments

good will, were doing their best to describe what they heard
and saw. Only, of course, there must be some mistake,
because miracles don't happen." There must be some mis-
take ; yes, no doubt. Only, what mistake can it possibly have
been?

Take the story of the empty tomb by itself. Could you have
circumstantial evidence more complete? The body had
disappeared; is there any possible motive to assign for its
removal by any human agent using natural means ? There is
absolutely none. Even if you refuse to believe that the Jews
took special precautions to keep the tomb safe, you must still
recognize that the story of their doing so is true to life. It was
in their interest to keep the body, and to be able at any
moment to produce it, should any claim be made that Jesus
of Nazareth had risen from the dead. If they removed it from
the grave, why did they not produce it afterwards ? Nor had
Pilate, the Roman governor, any reason for wishing to
smuggle away the body of the man he had crucified ; its
presence might conceivably lead to rioting and disturbance,
but its disappearance was far more likely to have that effect.
The women cannot have stolen it, for they were not strong
enough to move away the stone, let alone to overpower a
military guard. Did the guard, then, desert their posts, and
some other human agent remove the body before the women
came? That was the only possibility which presented itself to
Mary Magdalen. Could Joseph of Arimathea have carried it
away, or Nicodemus? But, in any of these events, why did
not the agent who had removed the body give any sign,
afterwards, of what he had done? If he were friendly disposed
towards the disciples, to the disciples ; if he were ill disposed,
to the Jews? And, whatever their motives, why did they
leave the winding-sheet and the napkin lying there, instead of
taking the body as it lay? The presence of the grave-clothes is
also fatal to the theory, which has (I believe) been suggested,

Early in the Morning 63

that the body was buried deeper in the ground as the result of
the earthquake.

No, if you are going to give a merely natural account of the
whole story, the account which was first given still holds the
field. I mean, that there was deliberate fraud on the part of
the disciples, who wanted to give the impression that their
Master had risen from the dead. What you have to decide is,
whether such a notion is consistent with the behaviour of
those same people two days before, at the Crucifixion,
running away and leaving their Master to face his persecutors
alone, and with the behaviour of those same people, in the
years which followed, suffering imprisonment and dying in
support of a story which they had made up to deceive the
public. I wonder, did they ?

VIII

EGYPTIAN ENCHANTMENTS

|F any of you lias ever tried arguing about
miracles with Bis non-Catholic friends he
has probably had a disconcerting experience.
After you have spent half the evening trying
to refute the objections of a man who says
that miracles are simply impossible, and that there is no serious
evidence that any such event has ever occurred in human
history, somebody else chips in on the odier side of the argu-
ment ; and you have to spend the other half of the evening
answering the objections of a man who says, of course, there
have been miracles in human history, some of them done by
Christians, but why make such a fuss about it? All religions
can produce their miracles, just as much as ours ; they were all
cradled in an atmosphere of supernatural happenings. And,
more than that, there are religions which can produce
miracles to-day ; the Christian Scientists with their faith-heal-
ing cures, the spiritualists with their extraordinary revelations
of secrets which could not have been known to the medium,
their photographs of preternatural bodies, and all the rest of
it. Not to mention the odd people you read of in the papers,
the dervishes who can walk on hot coals without burning
themselves, or the man who is, I believe, on view now, who
is said to be able to emit a luminous radiance from his body
whenever he sets his mind to it. All that, your friend will say,
has to be taken into account before you use the evidence of

64

Egyptian Enchantments 65

miracles to prove, or even help to prove, the truth of Chris-
tianity or of Catholicism. You have done more, you have
proved the truth of all religions, or practically all religions,
while you were about it.

That's always happening to one in religious discussions.
You start out by having to show that miracles are not impos-
sible ; and before you know where you are you are having to
answer the objection that they are ridiculously common. In a
word, to round off our course, we want to consider the
question, "Does anybody else besides God do miracles?"
What are we to make of miracles outside the Church?
Do the Mahomedan miracles prove Mahomedanism? Did
the Jansenist miracles prove Jansenism? Do the Christian
Scientist miracles prove Christian Science? And it's quite
important, you know, because the English people at its roots
is curiously superstitious, and there is a reaction, nowadays,
from the confident scepticism of our fathers. We want to
have an attitude towards the people who are too positive, not
only towards the people who are too negative.

In the first place, let us get our minds clear about the state-
ment that all religions are cradled in stories of miracle. It is
quite true that when men are writing of a very distant past,
and concerned to honour the memory of some great hero, or
even to record the origins of dieir gods, they do tend to
weave into their account wonderful happenings after all, it
all happened a very long time ago, and things must have been
very different. That is one thing ; but, you see, the Christian
religion is in quite a different case. The miracles related of our
Lord and his apostles are related by eye-witnesses, or at least
by contemporaries ; the documents in which they occur are
documents whose date can be established, beyond the possi-
bility of reasonable cavil, as going back behind the destruc-
tion of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. And the miracles are bound up,
structurally, with the narrative; you cannot, with whatever

66 In Soft Garments

ingenuity, separate die documents into different strata, the
earlier of which will be non-miraculous. It is extraordinary
the way people will tell you that they believe the Gospel, but
not the Gospel miracles. If you ask them what they mean by
the Gospel, they will tell you that there was a man called Jesus
of Nazareth who went about doing good. When they say
that, bring them up short by asking them what good he did?
Oh, he was gentle, he was considerate, he was forgiving. But
where do you hear that he ever gave money to the poor, or
nursed the sick, or comforted the mourner, or buried the
dead, or visited anybody in prison? Nowhere ; he may have,
but die Gospels tell us nothing about it. When we say that
our Lord went about doing good, we mean that he healed
the sick, raised the dead, and so on ; that very habit of " doing
good" which is the first thought die mention of our Lord's
name calls up to us, is, when you come to think of it, a habit
of performing miracles. You can't get on without the
miracles ; the whole story goes to pieces.

No, the appearance of Christianity is accompanied by
something which did not really belong to the world in which
it appeared. A belief in miracles ; an expectation that miracles
would take place, a conviction that they had taken place, on
such and such occasions. When our Lord sends out his
aposdes he tells them to perform miracles, to lay their hands
on the sick, and drink poison without fear of harm. Now, it is
perfect nonsense to talk, though you will hear people some-
times talk, as if the men of that day found it easy to believe in
miracles because they weren't such frightfully scientific
people as we are nowadays. Oh, it is true that common
people were superstitious, believed in fortune-telling and ia
love-philtres and witchcraft generally. So you will find
Simon Magus all the rage at Samaria, and the governor of
Cyprus keeping a sort of tame soothsayer, and so on. But
people were not expecting miracles all the time, and when

Egyptian Enchantments 67

they saw the miracles done by the apostles their reactions
showed it. "When St Paul healed the crippled man at Lystra,
they all said, "The gods are come down to us in the likeness of
man," and tried to do sacrifice to diem. So, when St Paul
was uninjured by the bite of the snake, the people of Malta
thought he was a god. They did not look upon a miracle as
something ordinary or commonplace ; it carried their minds
straight back to their mythologies, to the stories of Philemon
and Baucis, or the invulnerable Achilles.

Another difference I think you can notice between the tall
stories you will find recorded in the classical writers and the
miracles of our Lord. Most of the tall stories you will find in
the classical writers are stories of omens and portents, or of
punishments inflicted by the gods on people who had defied
them. The characteristic of nearly all our Lord's miracles,
nearly all those in the Acts of the Apostles, nearly all those in
the lives of the saints, is that they were designed to show, not
God's power only, but also his mercy. It is to heal the sick, to
comfort the bereaved, to relieve the poor, to deliver the
unjustly imprisoned, to save those in imminent danger of
death, that die Christian miracles for the most part were per-
formed. God wants us to see that he is powerful, but he wants
us to see that he is merciful too. Apart from the Old Testa-
ment, in which our Lord's coming and character were fore-
shadowed, you will not find, or will very seldom find, those
miracles of mercy in the records of antiquity. I think it is
probably true to say that the Christian miracles have set the
type, and have produced the impetus, for most of the stories
of religious miracle which have cropped up since then. It is
curious to note that the consciousness of Christianity as a rival
seems to have the effect of making other religions breed
stories of miracle for themselves. I think there cannot really
be much doubt that Philostratus' life of Apollonius of Tyana,
written in the third century A.D., was a Pagan come-back

68 In Soft Garments

deliberately designed to meet the overwhelming competition
of Christian teaching. I understand it is true to say that the
earliest lives of Buddha have no miraculous element in them,
and that stories like that which represent him as born of a
virgin date from a time when Christianity had already pene-
trated into India. And, as Paley pointed out, the miracles
attributed to Mahomet are not recorded in the Koran
Mahomet himself seems to have made rather a point of the
idea that miracles were unnecessary but only came into
circulation several centuries later, when Christendom and
Islam were already matched in the struggle for world-
domination. If all religions have their miracles, you see, that
does not prove that there may not have been a certain in-
fringement of copyright.

And, of course, as these conferences have insisted, the
Catholic religion differs from most other religions, differs
even from most other denominations of Christianity, in that
it was not merely cradled in an atmosphere of the miraculous,
but lives and breathes in an atmosphere of the miraculous.
Miracles are not always equally abundant, but the faith is
always there ; when the deacon Peter asks St Gregory in his
dialogues why it is that miracles don't happen nowadays, St
Gregory first of all gives reasons why they shouldn't happen,
and then points out that they do. All the discoveries of science
about the nature of diseases and so on have not lessened our
faith in the possibility of miracle ; rather, they have increased
it. For, in proportion as medicine grows more exact in its
methods and more careful in its habits of observation, in that
proportion we can feel more certain, when such and such a
cure is effected, that the finger of God was really there.
When you hear doctors doubting about the miracles at
Lourdes, you will find that the complaint they are making is
not one against religion; diagnosis, they say; some ass of a
French G JP.- didn't know his own business. If that is so, we

Egyptian Enchantments 69

can only hope that doctors will get more and more scientific ;
then the miracles at Lourdes will be more manifest than ever.
Meanwhile, what are we going to make of these miracles
outside the Church, or strange happenings anyhow outside
the Church, which have taken place in recent times or are
taking place now, among the Christian Scientists, among the
spiritualists, in odd cases which crop up here and there of dual
personality, of queer pathological states, and so on? In the
first place, let us take a leaf out of our opponents' book I
mean, the book which they have just put back in its shelf, the
anti-miraculous book and admit quite freely that there may,
probably enough, be powers in the mind to influence matter
which are still unexplored, and perhaps may be incapable of
scientific analysis, and yet do not pass the bounds of the
natural. I was being told the other day of an experiment at
which Dr Schiller was present, when a medium, apparently
by simply looking at a piece of paper, managed to repro-
duce on it an exact facsimile of a well-known criminal's
thumb-mark ; the criminal was dead, but they had a copy of
the thumb-mark in the police records. Well, there are people
who will say, "Doesn't that prove that there is a Hfe after
death?" To my mind, it doesn't prove anything of the kind.
If the spirit of the criminal was really there at the seance, I
don't see why it should want to go leaving its thumb-marks
about all over the place, even if it had a thumb to leave marks
with. If it retained any of the characteristics it had during life,
I should have thought its first instinct would have been to
wear gloves. No, if you assume that the facts are as reported,
and that there was really no trickery, then I should say with-
out hesitation that it shows we have only begun to under-
stand the least little bit about thought-transference. And in
the same way I would say of the Christian Scientists that, if
their results are really genuine, then it shows that will-power
can do more in the way of interference with matter than we

70 In Soft Garments

thought it could ; just as, according to some stories one hears,
it can enable men to stick knives into themselves without
bleeding, or walk on hot iron without being scorched.

Of course that means, and we have got to recognize that it
means, a certain modification on our part of the claims which
our forefathers have been accustomed to make when the
question of the miraculous was discussed. It means that the
total number of ascertainable miracles with which the records
of sanctity have hitherto been credited is somewhat reduced.
For instance, I had speech, last July, with a woman at Lourdes,
a Protestant woman from Chorley in Lancashire, who was,
that afternoon, enjoying the use of her sight for the first time
in, I think, twenty months. It had been restored to her
suddenly during the great procession of the Host in the after-
noon. Now, that may have been a miracle. It was certainly a
great favour, and I hope the woman has become a Catholic by
now. But those who were in charge of the hospital did not
even trouble to report the case to the Bureau des Constatations
why? Because there had never been anything wrong with
the physical organ of sight ; the woman had been unable to
see because she could not, or thought she could not, open her
eyelids. And that, you see, may have been a merely hysterical
condition. I think it is established by now that hysterical
patients can sometimes be cured by a sudden shock of any
kind, like the son of Croesus in Herodotus who had always
been dumb, but suddenly broke into speech when his father's
capital was being sacked by the enemy. So in this case ; there
is always the possibility of a miracle, but the circumstances
were such that you could not appeal to it as a miracle for evi-
dential purposes; it may equally well have been a cure of
hysteria by shock. We should have heard plenty about it in
the papers if it happened in England. But when those things
happen at Lourdes, so common are they, they are not even
reported to the Bureau,

Egyptian Enchantments 71

But, of course, when we have said, that, the objector will
try to press his advantage. If you admit, he says, that some of
the cures at your holy places are due to mind-healing or
shock, and admit in the same breath that we do not as yet
know how far the triumphs of mind over matter may not go,
without passing beyond the natural order, surely we have a
right to extend the same principle, and make it cover AIL the
stories of remarkable cures, whether at Lourdes or elsewhere?
Surely the difference between major and minor miracles is not
a difference of kind, but of degree ; and we shall be able to
explain the major as well as the minor when we have investi-
gated the natural possibilities more thoroughly? Well, the
debating answer to that is that we wish they would hurry up
and do it. These men of science, many of them actuated by
fanatical hatred against the Church, have had the opportunity
of producing hypnotic cures to rival the cures of Lourdes
these eighty years past, and they have failed to do it, certainly
not from lack of good-will. But the answer is better expressed
thus. It is grossly unscientific to assume that because you have
an explanation which will admittedly cover some of a group
of phenomena, therefore the same explanation, by parity of
reasoning, MUST cover the whole. There is such a thing as
suggestion in medicine. Most of you will remember the old
Punch picture of the doctor taking out the thermometer from
a patient's mouth, and the patient saying, "Ah, doctor, that
done me a power of good." I imagine it happens fairly
frequently that a doctor pretends to give a sick person a
sleeping-draught, which in reality is just water with a little
colouring matter, and the patient obediently goes to sleep
through the power of suggestion ; or the doctor pretends to
inject morphia and really injects nothing of the kind, with the
same result. Does that prove that all sleeping-draughts really
work through the power of suggestion ; that real morphia has
no powers, except those with which it plays upon, the patient's

72 In Soft Garments

suggestibility? No, until they have paralleled our major
miracles, or conclusively disproved the evidence for them, the
least science can do is to say, "We have explained a certain
proportion of these cures by mind-healing ; the remainder
seem due to another cause, which we have not yet identified."

When we say that, of course, all the other miracle-mongers
are up in arms. How is it, they ask, that you Catholics expect
scientists to take notice of your miracles, and submit them to
patient investigation, while you yourselves will not investi-
gate the cures worked by Christian Science, or join a spiri-
tualist circle to find out for yourselves whether extraordinary
things really do happen there ? Our answer to that objection
is perfectly simple. It is that we do not know and perhaps do
not greatly care whether such things can be explained by
natural causes or whether they take their origin from spiritual
agencies which are not of God. All we know is that such
modern miracles do not conform to the type of miracles with
which, as we believe, the Christian message has always been
associated ; that they are not such as can be reconciled with the
Nature of God and the character of his dealings with man-
kind, as we know them either by reason or by revelation.
That point I must expand quite briefly.

The divine miracles, as we understand them, are excep-
tional favours, bestowed here and there, now and then
birthday presents, as it were, to remind us that we are after all
his children. He does not perform them as a rule to order,
unfailingly, in answer to some special effort on our part. There
are exceptions to that rule; the blood-miracles of Naples and
the surrounding country for example, if they are miracles
indeed. But in the ordinary way he does mean miracles to
be the exception, not the rule. We are not to pension off the
doctors and neglect to have the drains seen to because, some-
times, there may have been a miraculous cure of typhoid. We
are not to neglect prayers for the dead because, now and

Egyptian Enchantments 73

again, we have supernatural proof that a soul has missed its
Purgatory. That is what is die trouble with these modern
devotees of miracle ; they overdo it ; they make it the rule,
not the exception. They want us to believe that there is no
such thing as pain, that it cannot be God's will for a human
being to suffer. They want us to believe that there is no such
thing as death, no plunge into the mysteries of the unknown.
And that is not our philosophy, nor is it a human philosophy
at all ; we cannot believe that God countenances it, whatever
manifestations may accompany it.

IX
THE LIVING WITNESS

|HERE are people who call themselves Chris-
tians, without belonging to any religious
organization. Granted that the full revelation
of God is to be found in our Lord Jesus Christ,
we must still prove, before considering the
nature of his Church, that he did found a Church at all ; that he
did want an assemblage of people, inheriting all down the
centuries the same tradition of doctrine, to continue the work
of his revelation and to safeguard its genuineness. That point
I want to make this morning, in as short a space as I can
manage.

Any alleged revelation from God to man must, if its in-
fluence is to last beyond the lifetime of men contemporary
with its appearance, perpetuate itself in one or other of two
ways. Its doctrine must be enshrined either in a book or in a
legitimately constituted succession of living teachers. You can
point to many religions of the book in the course of history ;
take Mormonism, for example. Mormonism was founded by
a young American called Joseph Smith, who declared that he
had found a book made entirely of plates of thin gold, hidden
in the side of a hill near his home ; it was said to have been
written in "reformed Egyptian," whatever that may be, and
it contained a full history of the colonization of North
America after the destruction of the tower of Babel. Eight
persons swore that they had seen the gold-plate original ; but

74

The Living Witness 75

all that survived was a translation made by some of Smith's
friends, Smith himself dictating it to them from behind a
curtain. It was round this Book of Mormon that the whole
cult grew up ; the gold plates themselves were conveniently
carried offby an angel before anyone else saw them.

But there is this trouble about any religion whose revela-
tion is merely enshrined in a book ; that doubts of interpreta-
tion may arise as to what the book means, and then you have
no means of knowing which is the right and which is the
wrong interpretation. Or new conditions arise, and it is
necessary for the new sect to have an attitude and a policy
about them; yet it is in vain that they go to the book for
guidance. So that even a religion which starts from a book
tends more and more to grow into a church ; to develop its
own rulers and its own system of government; to live by
traditions which are handed on, not merely by what is found
written in the book from which it started. That happened, of
course, with the Mormons; the Book of Mormon said
distinctly that each believer was only to have one wife, but
this arrangement was found inconvenient, and after a private
revelation given to Joseph Smith was discontinued.

Well, as you know, the Christian religion is not and never
has been the religion of a book. It was perfectly easy for our
Lord Jesus Christ, if he had wanted to, to have dictated to his
Apostles a book as long as the Old Testament or as the Koran,
and to have left this book, after his Ascension, to guide all the
world into his truth. But he didn't do that ; and for a score of
years, perhaps, after his Ascension, the Christian religion was
preached everywhere by word of mouth ; nobody studied the
Gospels or preached about the Gospels, because there were no
Gospels to study or to preach about. It was only when living
memories began to fade that there was a demand for authentic
accounts of our Lord's own words, so far as they could be
remembered ; our Lord's own actions, so far as they were not

76 In Soft Garments

already familiar to die faithful. No, our Lord did not leave a
book, he left behind him a body of people. That, after all, was
natural. He came to fulfil the old prophecies of the Jews ; and
their prophets had told them that when the Messiah came he
would save a remnant of the people ; not all the people, but a
faithful remnant of them. This remnant our Lord usually
referred to as a kingdom, the kingdom of God, the kingdom
of heaven. On two occasions at least he called it his congre-
gation or assembly ; and the Greek word for that, ecdesia, is,
of course, the word by which we know it, his Church. That
became, from the first ages, its common appellation; you
will find the term used no less than fifty times in the
writings of St Paul. Of course, it was to be something more
than die mere word "kingdom" implies; our Lord told
his followers that he was the Vine and they were the
branches, that is, that there was a spiritual unity which was
to bind each of them to the others and all of them to him.
He told them that the Holy Spirit was to come and dwell
in them, to guide them into all truth. But the point to
notice here is that, deliberately, he left behind him a
Church.

Everybody who has studied the Gospels seriously admits
that; all Christians, you may say roughly, admit that. But
then, what kind of fact is this Church, of which he speaks in
such glowing terms, to which he makes such glorious
promises? Is it a definite body of people, united together by
external marks, by a common worship and a common faith,
with its own definite boundaries, so that you can say with
certainty So-and-so is a member of the Church, So-and-so
does not belong to the Church? The contrary has often been
held by Protestant thinkers, and is still at the back of a great
deal of Protestant thought. The true-blue Protestant idea of
the Church is that it is not a definite body of people to which
you can point, whose numbers you can count. It is the total

The Living Witness 77

number of those souls which will, as a matter of fact, be saved
and find their way to heaven. Only God knows the number
of those souls, and which they are ; here on earth we have our
sects and our denominations, but no one of these, nor even the
sum total of these, can be described as the Church of Christ,
The Church of Christ is something invisible, a hidden body,
which will never be known until the day of judgment. Of
course, if that doctrine were true, it would be merely wasting
your time to give you conferences all through this term about
the marks of the true Church ; the whole point of the true
Church, on this theory, is that there are no marks by which it
can possibly be recognized. No external organization, in faith
or discipline or worship, can give you any idea of its extent.
Even the old lady you have probably heard the story who
founded a particular sect of her own, to which only two
people belonged, herself and her coachman, felt that
difficulty. When they asked whether she really believed that
she and her coachman were the only people who would ever
get to heaven, she replied, "Wed, I'm no so sure about
John."

It's worth while, then, to look a little at our Lord's teaching
and try to find out what kind of thing he meant this Church
of his to be. Was it to be an invisible Church, such as the old-
fashioned Protestants declared it to be, or is it a visible fact,
so that we can point to it and define it, and say that it numbers
so many souls in China, or in Lancashire, or wherever it may
be, without fear of contradiction?

The sentence in which our Lord settled that question, it
seems to me, once for all, is a sentence which he used not once
but several times, so that it is familiar to all of us I mean the
sentence, "Many are called, but few are chosen." I'm sorry
to bother you with Greek, but there's no help for it here ;
the word eccksia does mean something called out, that and
nothing else. The Church, then, the ecdesia, consists of the

7 8 In Soft Garments

kletoi, the people who are called; and less than a hundred
per cent, of these (that is all "few" means) are chosen ; that is
to say, will be rewarded with eternal life in heaven. All
through his parables our Lord is rubbing that lesson in. The
kingdom of heaven, the Church, is like ten virgins, five wise
and five foolish only five of them are saved, but all ten of
them are in the Church. The kingdom of heaven is like a
great supper, to which a number of people are called, but one
of them is found to be without a wedding garment, and is
cast out into the exterior darkness. It is like a net thrown into
the sea, which brings in some fish that are eatable, and some
that are worthless ; it is like a field, in which some of the crop
is honest wheat, and the rest mere useless cockle. Now, when
our Lord goes out of his way to talk like that, does he not
make it clear that his Church is something different from that
ideal assembly of the elect which the old-fashioned Protes-
tants declared it to be? Does he not make it clear that it consists
of a recognizable body of people, some of whom, but not
all of whom, will attain everlasting life?

Our Lord did more than found a Church ; he founded a
hierarchy. Of course, one expects any religious teacher to
have his own group of chosen disciples ; a few who go about
with him everywhere and see more of him than the generality
of his contemporaries do. But if you come to think of it, all
through the record which the Gospels give us our Lord is
more concerned with the instruction of twelve men than
with all the rest of the Jews. He must teach the multitudes and
heal their sick, because they will not leave him alone ; but
when he sees the chance, he will steal away into a desert
place with his disciples. And after his Resurrection, though
we are told that on one occasion he appeared to more than
500 brethren at once, it is evident that for the most part he
was closeted with his twelve apostles, speaking to them of the
things which pertain to the kingdom of God, that is, his

The Living Witness 79

Church. They were not, then, merely witnesses whom he
must always have about him, they were something more
important than that ; the nucleus round which his Church
was to grow. And so it is to them he speaks in words such as
he never uses in his public discourses: "As the Father hath
sent me, I also send you . . . all authority is given to me,
going therefore teach ye all nations . . . whose soever sins you
remit, they are remitted unto them, and whose soever sins
you retain, they are retained" ; and to St Peter above all he
gives the privilege of immovable faith, and the power to bind
and to loose. You see, then, that our Lord from the first
meant his Church to centre round a hierarchy ; took more
trouble, you may say, about forming the character and con-
firming the faith of the Church's future rulers than about
baptizing people or making converts; indeed, when he
ascended into heaven, the Church he left behind him was
only a Church of 120 souls. But he had the nucleus ; he had
the cadre of his army, the rank and file could wait. And that
means, clearly, that it was his intention to leave behind him
an institution with a visible membership, with rules, with
officials, in a word, an organized Church.

All that is so plain that I am almost ashamed to remind you
of it. But I think you will find, the more you go about among
Protestants, that diis whole idea of our Lord's career has been
left out of sight in most of the theologies of to-day. They talk
as if he merely meant us to acquire from him a certain outlook
upon life, and to mould our characters accordingly ; or at any
rate to observe certain rules of conduct; or at most to believe
certain things which he told us about his heavenly Father, and
the forgiveness of sins, and the world to come. God knows he
did mean us to do all that, and we do some of it, most of us,
very imperfectly. But there is something that comes before
all that, is presupposed by all that ; before we do anything for
his sake, or believe anything on his assurance, he wants us to

8o In Soft Garments

be something; to be members of Ms Church. He wants to
incorporate us into himself by incorporating us into a living
society, continuous from his day to ours. We know, of
course, that those who are outside the Church and remain
outside the Church in good faith can be saved by that tide.
And we have no idea, we don't profess to have any idea, how
many millions of souls that qualification will include. All
we do know is that however numerous they are, they are
exceptions. The right way to enter eternal life begins it
doesn't end, heaven knows, but it begins with visible
membership of Christ's true Church.

So, if you get arguing with your non-Catholic friends
about religion, you mustn't let them, think that we Catholics
differ from them over one or two additional points of doc-
trine which we believe and they don't, like indulgences or
the infallibility of the Pope. The question over which we
diiFer from them is a fundamental one, which precedes all
other discussion and all other possibilities of agreement or
disagreement. "We believe that the first requisite of the Chris-
tian vocation is to belong to a particular religious body, the
religious body which is represented in England by the Car-
dinal Archbishop of Westminster and those other bishops
who are in communion with him. If you don't belong to that
body, it doesn't make the slightest difference whether you
believe in indulgences, or the infallibility of the Pope, or any-
thing of that kind ; mere believing won't help you, unless you
enjoy, or are prepared to accept, membership of the one
visible Church of Christ. And therefore it is of fundamental
importance for any soul which is really seeking the truth to
discover which that one visible Church of Christ is.

The creed which will be said in your name a few moments
from now, the Nicene Creed, as they call it, affirms belief
among other things in One Holy Catholic and Apostolic
Church. Now, we are not alone in making that claim for our-

The Living Witness 81

selves. The Churches of the East, out of Communion with the
See of Rome, use the same words at the corresponding point
in their liturgy; so does the Church of England, except that
for some reason or other the word "Holy" has disappeared
from the description. It is said to have been a printer's error ;
the printer may have had his tongue in his cheek ; anyhow,
there it stands. But the Anglican claim is evidently meant to
be the same. Now, in which of those three bodies each of
them is a visible, organized body of Christians shall we find
this common claim justified? Not until he has decided that
question can a man be certain that he has taken the first step,
the very first step, in fulfilling the will of our Lord Jesus
Christ.

And, as I say, it is the tradition of Catholic apologetics that
we establish our claim to be the Church which our Lord
founded, by showing that the religious body to which we
belong exhibits these four notes or marks. That is how we
distinguish it from other religious bodies for which the same
claim might be made. You see, the old Church or assembly of
Jews did not need any marks to distinguish it. To belong to it,
with full membership at any rate, you had to be a Jew ; and
the centre of its worship was naturally Jerusalem, the Jewish
capital. But this new Church which our Lord founded had
no such qualification of nationality ; had not, as yet, any local
centre round which its loyalties could rally. Evidently, there
was the danger that in course of time you would get two
bodies of people, either of which claimed to be the true
Church. And, to adjudicate those claims, it was necessary
that the true Church should bear certain distinguishing
characteristics. Some of them arise from the very nature of
the case ; some depend on our Lord's own directions, given
to his apostles while he was still on earth. Let us run through
them very briefly.

The Church has to be one, ia the nature of the case, if it is to

82 In Soft Garments

be a visible Church at all. Our Lord made certain promises, of
vast moment, to his followers and to their successors. If there
are to be two bodies of people, each claiming with plausible
arguments to be the true Church, then one must be right and
the other wrong ; otherwise we could not be certain that our
Lord's promises had descended to both, or to either. If,
therefore, schisms happen within the body of Christendom,
the result of such schism is not to produce two Churches of
Christ ; what you have left is one true Church of Christ and
one schismatic body ; otherwise, after all these centuries, we
should no longer be certain that our Lord's promises held
good.

He has further laid it down, that his Church should be
distinguished by sanctity. Not in the sense that all Christians
are holy, however desirable that might be; or even that the
rulers of the Church should at all times be recognizably holy
people ; he will not interfere with the freedom of our wills to
that extent. But his true Church will always be productive of
saints. These signs shall follow them that believe; in my
name they shall cast out devils, they shall lay hands on the
sick, and they shall recover, and if they drink any deadly
thing, it shall not hurt them. Those special graces with which
our Lord delights his saints to honour will not be the property
of one age, they will appear in all ages, and die true Church
will always be able to point to them as an element in her
sanctity.

And again, our Lord insists that his Church is to be Catho-
lic; " Going, teach all nations." Generally speaking, it will be
possible in the event of schism to say, "Here on the one side
is a local body of Christians, all belonging to one race or one
geographical area, pertinaciously clinging to their own
national traditions, and on the other side you have die great
body of Christian people." It is to that principle that St
Augustine always appeals in his controversy with the Dona-

The Living Witness 83

tists. In Africa, you had two bodies of Christians, out of Com-
munion with one another; yet either held the true faith,
either came down from the apostles, either administered valid
sacraments. How are you to distinguish which was the right
body to belong to? Why, on the very simple principle that
one of them was purely African, had no representatives in the
rest of the world, whereas the other was in visible com-
munion with the whole of Christendom.

And, lest even that test should be insufficient, as it might be
when it seemed that the whole world was being divided into
East and West, or that the whole of Europe was being divided
into North and South, we must recognize that the Church is
to be not only Catholic but Apostolic ; must trace its descent
by unbroken tradition from the Apostles. It must preserve
the continuous tradition of the priesthood, by the laying on
of hands ; every priest must be able to say, " Such and such a
bishop ordained me." And there must be continuity of juris-
diction; "As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you";
the care of a given group of human souls was to belong, not
to any chance preacher at the street corner who felt moved to
get up and testify, but to a pastor duly commissioned by the
general body of Christians to undertake that office. And
lastly, there must be continuity of faith ; if it can be proved
that any body of Christians has abandoned the teaching of the
first Christians, or has so watered it down that it is no longer
recognizable, then that body of Christians, however good
and devoted they may be, is something other than the true
Church.

Those are the points we shall be considering this term ; and
though they seem elementary enough, they are of an impor-
tance not to be estimated by their place in mere controversy.
They have a bearing on our duty as Catholics, and on the
witness we ought to bear, as Catholics, in a world which has
so largely forgotten the Christian message.

X

THE UNHOLINESS OF THE CHURCH

! HE second mark of the Church, her sanctity,
demands more careful and fuller treatment
from us than the remaining ones. Because in
all the other instances it is we who have the
obvious case, the prima facie case, to support
us ; it is our adversaries or our rivals who have to explain, and
to distinguish, and to qualify, and to hum and haw and beat
about the bush generally before they attempt to establish their
conclusions, not without the suspicion of special pleading.
Thus, when we talk about the unity of the Church, we can
appeal to visible facts; to the existence of a world-wide
organization which is as much a body corporate with a central
management as (to use Dean Inge's uncomplimentary
parallel) the Standard Oil Company. Whereas any other
form of Christianity has to adopt the old Oxford formula and
say, "It depends what you mean by unity" ; and so introduce
us to the notion of a unity which lies in the past, somewhere
in the first six centuries, or in the future, assuming that the
future ever comes off. So with Catholicity ; our Church evi-
dently embraces under a single formula peoples of widely
different nationalities, and habits of thought, and stages of
culture. Whereas Protestant Christianity makes very little
appeal to certain types of culture, the Latin for example; and
even so it is only by a considerable stretch of the imagination
that you can think of Protestant Christendom as a uniform

84

The Unholiness of the Church 85

system; is Bishop Barnes, for example, really a fellow-
believer of those American negroes whose notions of theo-
logy are reflected in the play called Green Pastures? So with
Apostohcity ; the continuity of our Church with the Church
of the Catacombs and of the Cenacle is a plain fact which you
can only deny at your own intellectual peril; you may say
that our doctrines have developed, that our notions of Chris-
tianity have become distorted, that we have become hard, and
exclusive, and standardized as the centuries have rolled over
us ; but no one in his senses can deny that ever since our Lord
spoke the words "As the Father hath sent me, I also send
you" there has been a continuous line of mission ; so that I can
trace my orders to Cardinal Bourne, and he to the Catholic
Bishop who ordained him, and so on and so on, if the regis-
ters of the Church had been kept exhaustively, right back
to the times of the apostles themselves. Whereas it is our
Anglican friends who have to take us for long excursions into
the history of the sixteenth century, and tell us how Bonner
was intruded into the See of London, though it is an odd fact
that the person who intruded him was in Anglican theory the
supreme Head of the Church in England. All through, you
see, it is they who have a difficult job to establish their conten-
tions, whereas we can merely point to the facts.

But in this matter of sanctity, our case is not by any means
so evident. True, so far as the external marks of sanctity are
concerned, we can point out that in our Church miracles are
a constantly expected occurrence, whereas outside the Church
they are claimed but rarely, and at times of special religious
revival. Or we can insist that the life of the cloister is natural
to the Catholic Church, whereas in the non-Catholic denomi-
nations that life is either wholly absent, or is a late and uncer-
tain development. But when you come to look at Protestants
as a whole, and Catholics as a whole, our prima facie case is by
no means so strong. Indeed, many people would tell you that

86 In Soft Garments

the Protestants have a stronger prima facie case than ourselves.
As I remember I put It once, it is probably less safe to leave
your umbrella at the door of a Catholic church than at the
door of a Methodist chapel. Elsewhere, the marks of the
Church lie plain on the surface ; when it comes to the mark of
holiness, we have to dig for it.

And there's another difference, which for the moment I
will only indicate briefly. You and I can't make the Church
more one than she is ; we can't make the Church more Catho-
lic than she is; we can't make the Church more Apostolic
than she is. But we can well, I won't say we can make the
Church more holy than she is, but we can make the Church
look more holy than she does, we can extend the area of her
sanctity and develop its possibilities, by the common actions
of our ordinary daily lives.

Now, what are the reasons for this impression, common in
English-speaking countries, that Protestants are well-behaved,
decent sort of people, whereas Catholics, take them all round,
are a low lot? Well, there's one explanation which does no
discredit to us. The Catholic religion is one of the natural
religions of the world, not a religion of the sacristy or a
religion of the Sunday school tea-fight ; and Catholic piety,
in consequence, can flourish in surroundings which are still,
by the Puritan judgments of the English mind, accounted
risky or even disreputable. And there's no doubt, I suppose,
that if you went through a Hst of what I may call the morally
dangerous trades, of all the walks of life which one's aunts
didn't approve of, actors and actresses and bookmakers and
jockeys and prizefighters and the rest of it, you would find a
very high proportion of professing Catholics as compared
with professing Protestants; much higher than if you went
through the grocers and the haberdashers and the undertakers
and so on. It may be partly a question of nationality, but I
think it is largely a question of opportunity. While Puritan-

The Unholiness of the Church 87

ism was strong, Catholics went into the professions which
Protestants didn't like to go into because they were not quite
nice ; and, by force of tradition, even now when Puritanism
has grown weaker, Catholics go into those professions still.

To that extent, the impression that we Catholics are an un-
holy set of people is ill-founded. But Tm afraid it's perfectly
true, and more true than most people realize, that a good
many of the world's rogues are Catholics. It's extraordinary-
how often you will come across Catholic names when you are
reading in the newspaper the records of crime, whether on a
small scale or on a large scale. I expect you know the story of
the Catholic chaplain at Sing-Sing, who was explaining to a
visitor how unscrupulously and uncharitably people talked
about the Church. "Why," he is reported to have said, "you
will actually hear people say that all the prisoners who are
executed at Sing-Sing are Catholics. Whereas I can assure you
that there are five prisoners now awaiting execution, and one
of them's a Jew." Now, it's perfectly true that in a way this
unholiness of Catholics is a compliment to our religion.
Because it does mean that a Catholic does not necessarily
cease to be a Catholic because he is a rogue. He knows what is
right even when he is doing what is wrong. The Protestant
as a rule will give up his faith first and his morals afterwards ;
with Catholics it is the other way round. The Protestant only
feels his religion to be true as long as he goes on practising it ;
the Catholic feels the truth of his religion as something inde-
pendent of himself, which does not cease to be valid when he,
personally, fails to live up to its precepts. But I think there's
more to it than that. I think it's quite probably true that when
a Catholic does go wrong he or she goes worse than other
people.

After all, theologically speaking, there is nothing whatever
to be surprised at in that. When you think of all the means of
grace a Catholic has had; the clearness of the teaching he has

88 In Soft Garments

received, the positiveness of his conviction; the sacrament of
penance to give him frequent opportunities of amendment,
to bestow grace by which that amendment might have been
achieved ; his Communions, the privilege of becoming one
with Christ, made Deiform, when he approached the altar ;
the example of holy lives lived around him, the influence,
very often, of a devout Catholic home if a man starts with
all those spiritual privileges and yet makes a mess of his life, is
it wonderful as a matter of psychology that he should react to
the other extreme ; is it wonderful as a matter of theology that
the grace which has wooed him so patiently should weary of
its patience at last? I do not mean, of course, that grace alto-
gether deserts him ; there is hope for the most abandoned, and
God knows there may be plenty of souls now in prisons and
penitentiaries that will find their way to heaven sooner than
you and I. But that the holiest Church should produce the
greatest sinners is but the natural application of the principle
that the corruption of the best is the worst.

The ordinary Protestant, then, is vaguely aware that cer-
tain Catholics live remarkably holy lives, shut up in convents
or in monasteries. He sees young men from Campion Hall
going out to lectures, looking good, and he thinks it rather a
fine thing that there should be men living such beautifully
disciplined lives, though he is quite certain that it would not
do for him. On the other hand, he has only got to read up the
murder trials and such other parts of the news in the Sunday
papers as are more attentively followed, to find out that there
are people bearing Catholic names, brought up in Catholic
schools, who do no credit to the system at all. If, therefore,
he is in search of a religion, and if (like most Englishmen)
he is prepared to judge of a religion mainly by the type of
character it produces, he is driven back, in fairness, to con-
templating the lives of Catholics who are neither particularly
saints nor particularly sinners, people like you and me. And

The Unholiness of the Church 89

that, as I say, is where this second mark of the Church comes
home to us personally.

I know what you are going to say. You are going to say
that it is a poor motive for living a virtuous life, to live it for
the sake of its effect on other people ; to be always looking out
of the corner of your eye to see whether there's a proctor
watching you not going into the George bar. Well, of course,
I mean nothing of the sort. I don't mean that there is any
motive for living a virtuous life which is either worth having
or worth admiring except the love of God and the desire to
imitate Jesus Christ. But it is true that in countries like our
own, and in a society like that of Oxford, where Catholics
mingle freely with other people and corne under the close
scrutiny of other people, the Catholic who lives carelessly
commits, in however slight a degree, an added sin of scandal.
It is necessary, our Lord says, that scandals should come,
but woe to that man through whom they come. If all Catho-
lics were saints, the truth of our religion would become too
glaringly obvious, and there would be no real exercise of
faith in making one's submission to the Church. That Catho-
lics, from the Pope downwards, should sometimes give
scandal to people outside the Church, is according to the
consequent will of God. But woe to the man through whom
the scandal comes ; through him, that mark of holiness which
should be one of the Church's most distinguishing character-
istics has failed to shine out, for one questioning mind, for
one tortured conscience. "Nor knowest thou what argument
thy life to thy neighbour's creed hath lent" don't imagine
that because comparatively few men up here are received
into the Church, that is the measure of our responsibilities.
One is always hearing of people who were up here perhaps
five or six years ago becoming Catholics. And in the story of
their search for the truth, what they had seen of Catholic life
in Oxford counted for something. It was a pro or a con ; and

po In Soft Garments

your life, ill all probability, will be a pro or a con for some-
body, somebody you've lost touch with, lost sight of, but
who will come to ask himself later, "Does that theory square
with what one sees in real life? Is it supported, or is it contra-
dicted, by the behaviour of the Catholics I have known?"
And that will mean you.

Well, I've left myself very little time, and I hope you have
very little need, for an application of the moral. But, though
most of you are tired by now of hearing me say what you are
going to hear me say, I hope you will bear with me when I
say it ; it is a familiar theme. Do try to believe me when I tell
you that you Catholics are, in your generation, the city set on
a hill, the salt designed to be the salt of the earth, of which our
Lord spoke in his sermon on the Mount. I say, in your genera-
tion ; it was not true to the same extent in my own. Of course,
Catholics ought always to be the salt of the earth, but the
earth has never wanted salting so badly as now. Catholics
ought always to be the city set on a hill, but I suppose there
has never been a time since the Reformation, at which Catho-
lics were set so prominently on a hill as they are just now. I
say, do try to believe me ; you will think that I am talking
grey-beard's cant, preacher's commonplaces, but it is not that.
There is a time of life at which you are like a man on the crest
of a hill, who can see the traffic climbing up one side and
going down the other, both at once ; that is when you are in
middle age, and have lost the self-preoccupation of youth
without reaching the fixity of view which comes with elderly
life. And I am absolutely certain that in this new generation
of English people, your generation, it is the Catholic body
which has got to save our civilization, because nothing else
will. All the other things we lived by are going under. The
salt of the earth? and if the salt lose its savour, wherewith shall
it be salted? Have salt in yourselves, our Lord says ; it is you
that must have the reserves of energy, the positive influence

The Unholiness of the Church 91

which radiates ; you are not to take your standards from other
people ; it is the other people who are to take their standards
from you.

And, of course, it's hard for you to see that. You come up,
very largely, from schools where the Catholic tradition was in
force, where the natural thing to do was the right thing to do.
You find here a crowd of people of your own age, super-
ficially of the same culture as yourselves, and it seems natural
to go on doing what you have been accustomed to do, swim-
ming with the stream, taking your colour from people round
you. You feel rather small, coming into such a world of new
experience, and very naturally ; lots of your friends seem so
much cleverer, so much more experienced in the ways of life
than you. And it is the easiest thing in the world for you to
pick up, without noticing it, something of their hopelessly
vague attitude about religion and the world, about right and
wrong, about what matters and whether anything matters.
You don't fall in, please God, with the loose views many of
them have about elementary morals, about sex and purity in
particular; but you begin to think of the moral ideals which
you have been taught as if they were an ecclesiastical code,
belonging only to us Catholics, and binding only on us
Catholics, instead of being what they are God's law, his law
for everybody. You fall into slack ways, and worldly ways,
and riotous ways, out of mere human respect, because people
up here seem to do that sort of thing; weak fools, throwing
away with both hands your Catholic birthright.

But the Master whom we follow was holy, separated from
sinners ; and he has made his Church holy ; and his will is to
find that holiness visibly reflected, for all the world to see,
in you.

XI
WHEAT IN THE COCKLE

|HE parable of the wheat and the cockle is
really one of a pair; people often don't
realize that, because the sister parable does
not follow straight on it, but at an interval
of several verses, though they are both in the
same chapter. The sister parable, as I call it, is the one in
which our Lord compares the kingdom of heaven to a net
which is let down into the sea and draws up a great quantity
of fish, both bad and good. Either parable is an answer to
the question, "Do all Christians go to heaven?" And the
answer is "No." And if you ask why, either parable supplies
the same explanation ; God does not want it to be known, in
this life, which souls are his and which will meet with final
rejection ; it is better for our faith that we should belong to
a Church which has imperfect as well as perfect members ;
better for our watchfulness over ourselves that we should
realize the possibility of being a baptized Christian, and yet
not bound for heaven.

Let me draw that out a little. The field in which the wheat
and the cockle are sown is the world ; our Lord has told us
that; but the crop of grain, bad and good alike, is, I think,
the Church. It is in the Church, not simply in the world,
that bad and good grow together side by side. And the ser-
vants of the householder, that is, the angels, are represented

as saying, " Shall we root up the cockle ; shall we exterminate

92

Wheat in the Cockle 93

the wicked, as they were exterminated at the time of the
Deluge, and leave only the righteous to live?" And they are
told, "No, wait till the harvest, that is, till the judgment, and
then the distinction will be made clear ; then shall the just shine
forth in the kingdom of their Father." So in the other parable,
good fish and worthless fish alike must be carried in die net ;
it is only when the boat reaches the shore that they will be
separated, and the worthless fish will be thrown away ; then
shall the just shine forth in the kingdom of their Father. Till
then, you will have people who wear the sign of Christ on
their foreheads and take his name upon their lips, who will
not be able to resign their souls into his hands, with full con-
trition, at the last terrible moment of their lives.

If we are asked, "How can we be certain that God has
revealed himself to mankind?" that question can't be
answered all in one mouthful. We need a convergent proof
to make sure that there is one true revelation, and that the
Christian revelation is that one. And one piece of evidence we
want to adduce is the mere fact of Christendom, what it has
meant in history, what it means to-day, the way in which it
meets the needs and solves the difficulties of common living.
Logically, of course, such a proof couldn't stand by itself for
a moment ; but taken with the others it has weight. Only,
when we have admitted all that, isn't there, we are tempted to
ask, another side to it all? Mustn't we remember at the same
time the shortcomings of Christendom as we know it, and
balance these against the considerations we adduced in its
favour? And indeed, it's not difficult to imagine the line of
argument which would be adopted by our opponents in this
matter ; let us sketch it to ourselves for a moment.

"You claim," says our adversary, "that your Church,
alone among the institutions of the world, has defied the
centuries ; but consider how much stronger it once was, at
least in external influence, than it is now; are we certain that

94 In Soft Garments

it is not a machine which is runiiing down? You claim that it
is world-wide ; so it is, but think of the vast tracts of the world
in which its adherents are few and scattered; think how
many people die every day who have scarcely even heard
of Christianity. You tell us that it has been a great civilizing
influence ; but how many reforms, such as the abolition of
slavery, had to wait for long centuries, Christian centuries,
before they were effected ; think how many cruelties have
been practised before now, how many frauds, how many
acts of oppression, in the name of the Church. You say
that it has preached a consistent moral message, but look
at the long record of worldliness in high places, of Popes,
even, who set the moral law openly at defiance. You tell us
that Christendom has been the mother of the arts ; but think
of the revolting ugliness you find in so many modern Catho-
lic churches ; think of the church repositories. You tell us that
Christianity meets all the needs of mankind ; but if so, why
have we seen, in our own time, so many plausible substitutes
for it which have captured the imagination of many among
our contemporaries ; Christian Science, which tells you that
you do not know how to deal with the problem of suffering ;
Spiritualism, which teUs you that you are not courageous
enough in your attitude towards death ?

"Might it not have been expected, >T they argue, "that if
this Christian revelation of yours was really meant to be the
final revelation of God to man, its credentials would have
been presented to us in a still more impressive form, so that
all logical doubt of its divine origin would have been ex-
cluded? Might we not have expected that all Christian
bishops would have been holy men, that all religious orders
would have retained their pristine exactness of observance,
instead of falling into relaxation and needing reform? Might
we not have expected that Christianity would still inspire the
arts, and initiate movements of philanthropy, instead of eye-

Wheat in the Cockle 95

ing both with suspicion, and sometimes meeting them with
hostility? Might we not have expected that all Christians in
our own day would be distinguishable by that gracious mark
which singled them out in the old pagan world, when men
said, 'See how these Christians love one another"? In a word, if
God meant the existence of Christendom to be, if not the
proof of his revelation, at least its most signal advertisement,
would he not have been at pains to make it a little easier for
us ? To make it impossible for anybody to come in contact
with it and not immediately hail it as the truth, unless sheer
prejudice held him back from the confession ? ' *

All that can be said ; all that is said, and is perhaps in most
men's minds for we live in days when people are not fond of
speculative thought, preferring concrete issues the most
powerful motive at work in hindering the advance of Chris-
tianity. But the answer to it doesn't take much finding, and it
is this ; that if the Christian religion had borne upon its face
such unmistakable marks of a significance more than human,
we should be forced, as it were, into accepting its claims;
there would be no room for doubt in the matter, and conse-
quently no room for faith ; we should accept the Christian
revelation as unthinkingly as we accept the common facts of
our exterior life, without any process of mental discipline, any
spirit of adventure in our choice. Imagine what it would be
like if, as soon as the first persecutions were over, the Church
had immediately stood out in undimmed majesty, with no
schisms, no heresies, no exasperating friction with the secular
powers to chequer her history; if every Pope had become
impeccable at the moment when he became infallible, and
Alexander the Sixth had turned into a Savonarola at the
instant when the triple tiara was put on his head; if all the
triumphs of the Church had been achieved bloodlessly, and
all had been utilized immediately for the evident good of
mankind; if there had never been such a thing as a worldly

96 In Soft Garments

bishop, or an idle monk, or a venal friar ; if there had been no
Reformation to rend the body of Christendom, if there were
no rival religions to dispute with Catholicism the allegiance
of the human heart wouldn't it all be too obvious, too plain
sailing? Our Lord, it is quite evident, didn't contemplate any-
thing of that kind. It is necessary to the world, he said, neces-
sary, that scandals should come ; it is part of our probation, he
would have us understand, that we should be puzzled by all
these anomalies of religious history, and distressed at them,
and yet have enough strength of resolution to see behind
them and beyond them, and recognize die Church as his own
Bride, the inheritor of his promises and the completion of his
life.

Well, then, we are not going to treat the Christian reve-
lation as something self-evidently true, something that bears
the stamp of its own genuineness printed large on every page
of its history. The fact of Christendom is not a proof to the
world that God spoke through Christ ; it is rather a challenge
to the world to consider whether God did not speak through
Christ. It is possible for us to doubt it, just as it is possible to
doubt the existence of God himself. He has given us sufficient
proofs of his existence, and some knowledge, even, of his
own Nature, from the use of our unaided human reason. But
we must use it; we must apply our minds to the problem,
search for the truth, not expect it to fall straight into our
mouths for the asking. You can doubt God's existence by
simply not bothering about it; and he does not interfere,
commonly, by any sensational advertisement of his power
such as would force our minds back to him he does not
strike every perjurer dead, or every blasphemer dumb. That
would be to force us into belief ; and that is not his way. So
here, in this matter of the credentials with which his revela-
tion comes to us. There are credentials, but we have got to
look for them. We have got to cast our minds back across the

Wheat in the Cockle 97

gulf of history, to days very remote from our own ; we have
got to concentrate our attention upon one corner of the
world, not, even in those days, a very important corner of
the world ; we have got to put ourselves in the position of
men very different from ourselves in race, in culture, and in
outlook. We have got to go back to the life ofjesus of Naza-
reth, isolating the life-centre from which this vast organism
of Christianity has sprung.

And when we do that, when we go right back to the
origins of our religion, we shall see at once which elements in
the history of Christendom are native to it and fully repre-
sentative of its genius, which are accidental and false develop-
ments. In the parable, you see, the wheat was sown first ; the
cockle appeared only through a hostile afterthought ; if we go
back to the life of Christ, we shall find what seed he sowed,
and which is the legitimate crop thathas sprung fromhis teach-
ing. Thus, we shall claim that the Christian revelation is true,
because our Lord fulfilled, in the whole manner of his appear-
ance and in the whole scheme of his life, the prophecies made
to the Jews long before about the Messiah who was to come
and deliver them. Whether you look at isolated texts in the
Old Testament, or at the broad outline of the Messianic hope,
you will find, in the Gospels, its exact and yet unexpected
fulfilment. The events of our Lord's Life are the key which
fits the lock of Old Testament prophecy. What wonder then
if we find that the Church which he founded, his own
mystical Body and the visible continuation of his Incarnate
Life, meets the expectations and answers the needs of every
age in history ; interprets mankind to itself, inspires its art and
fosters its genius now more, now less, but always with a
kind of natural appropriateness? What wonder if in every age
and in every part of the world souls, very different in their
stage of development and in the range of their capacities, find
in the practice of the Christian religion the fulfilment of their

98 In Soft Garments

highest instincts? "Art thou he that should come, or do we
look for another?" The question answers itself; nobody looks
for another revelation, even in these late days; the world
accepts his revelation, or resigns itself to its despairs.

Again, we shall claim that the Christian revelation is true
because his miracles, culminating in the unique miracle of
his Resurrection, can neither be disregarded on historical
grounds, nor yet be philosophically explained, unless they
were meant to set the seal upon an authentic mission from
God to man. The lame walk, the deaf hear, the lepers are
cleansed, the dead are raised upso our Lord himself appeals
to his wonderful works to bear testimony of him. What
manner of man is this, his followers asked themselves, that the
wind and the sea obey him? What wonder, then, if we find
his Church in history capable of the most extraordinary con-
quests, meeting and vanquishing paganism in no strength but
that of her own inherent vitality, assimilating and taming the
barbarian elements that flooded into Europe in the Dark
Ages, holding her own against the stubborn nationalisms of
mediaeval Europe? What wonder if she, who lives with the
life of her Risen Master, dies so many deaths and achieves so
many resurrections; survives the Mahomedan attack, sur-
vives the Reformation, survives the French Revolution,
seems to gain strength, even in our own day, from all the
efforts that are made to disintegrate the civilization which she
gave us? "I have power to lay down my life, and power to
take it again." Wherever faith in the miracle of the Resurrec-
tion strikes deep root, the miracle of the Resurrection repeats

itself.

And we shall claim that the Christian revelation is true
because the character and the teaching of our Blessed Lord,
though it is only preserved for us in a few fragmentary
records, has the power to arrest human admiration and to
claim human sympathy as no other living force yet had. The

Wheat in the Cockle 99

proof for the existence of God was a convergent proof. So it is
with the proof we are discussing at present; our belief in the
authenticity of the Christian revelation is based on man's
expectation of Christ, on the evidence of Christ's power, and
on the evidence of his goodness. We would not claim belief
for a Christ who enjoyed miraculous powers, but offered no
moral inspiration, nor yet for a Christ who claimed our moral
sympathy, but showed no powers which exceeded those of
our common nature. So we base our argument partly on his
miracles, but partly on his character, on the atmosphere which
surrounded him, that fragrance which breathed from him, so
that men came away from listening to his simple direct
methods of preaching with the feeling, "never man spoke like
this Man." What wonder, then, if his saints in every age have
caught and handed on in their measure, the kindling enthusi-
asm of his appeal? The saints, after all, are the best advertise-
ment the Christian religion ever had. And we know that the
saints are really the characteristic products of Christendom,
its natural fruit, when we have looked back at the life of Jesus
of Nazareth, to find all their inspiration centred, and all their
light focused, in his.

XII
FAITH LOST AND FOUND

general notion of living by faith is not
peculiar to Catholics, or to Christians, or even
to religiously minded people. Everybody
who is not content merely to live for the day
and get the most enjoyment he can out of
pottering round the world aimlessly, wants, and demands, a
faith of some sort to live by. He wants it, because it is man's
nature to repose his confidence in something outside himself,
something other than himself; only a prig or a fool really sets
out with the idea of being self-reliant. Manis happy in the long
run only when he is giving himself, and so far as he succeeds
in giving himself, to something other than himself; only
when he is working for a cause or a creed or a personality to
which he can devote himself, with some kind of assurance
that he is not wasting his time in doing so. And that kind of
assurance can only be achieved by faith if we take faith in its
widest, its most human, its least supernatural acceptation.

What then do we mean by faith in this broad sense?
Tennyson, in a well-known passage, referred to it as "believ-
ing where we cannot prove." I think he was wrong ; proof is
a vague word, and I do not see that it is in the least difficult to
adhere by faith, whether human or divine faith, to a proposi-
tion which to you, at any rate, seems proved. And indeed, I
should very strongly object to the imputation that the Catho-
lic Faith cannot be proved ; it can. The proof is largely, almost

100

Faith Lost and Found 101

entirely, an a priori one, but it is proof nevertheless. And it is
quite possible to have human faith in some political doctrine,
say, for example, the doctrine of free trade, although you
believe that its principles can be demonstrated by economic
arguments, and are prepared to adduce such arguments to
anybody who will be patient enough to listen to them. I
would suggest that a far better definition would be "believing
where we cannot test! 9 It is impossible for an educated person
to believe by faith in the statement that the square on the
hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum
of the squares on die other two sides. It is impossible be-
cause, assuming the validity of Euclidean space and not
worrying with Einstein, the thing can be made evident by
demonstration, without leaving even the abstract possi-
bility that the assertion may be wrong; it is not merely
that the thing can be proved ; it can be proved to the
satisfaction of anyone who is capable of following a geo-
metrical argument. Faith only begins when the proposition
to which you assent is one that is doubted, or might quite
conceivably be doubted, by people of equal intelligence with
yourself.

And I say boldly that all men who have ideals and the
people who have no ideals in this world are always dull and
generally unhappy live by some kind of faith, by commit-
ting themselves to some kind of loyalty which is not uni-
versally recognized as the common property of all thinking
men. They must have something, something outside them-
selves, to make them feel that life is worth living, that good
rather than evil is the explanation of the world, that conduct
does matter and that right and wrong do exist, if they are
going to go on living at all. It is not a theology they demand,
particularly, it is just something outside themselves to keep
them going, to keep their heads above water, to save them-
selves from the alternative of committing suicide or collecting

IO2 In Soft Garments

postage stamps. And, as I say, you will find that there are
three things which can exercise such influence on a man's life ;
a personality, a philosophy, or a Cause to which he can devote
himself.

The influence of a personality may take the form of a great
love. Probably it does take that form more often than we
think ; we are all inclined to be a little cynical and disrespectful
in our attitude to other people's love affairs. There are really
people who find life worth living because they are allowed,
often with very little in the way of recognition or return, to
serve and to reverence a woman they love. Or it may be hero-
worship for somebody whose intellect, whose character,
whose prominence fascinates you. All this demands faith;
for your estimate of the personality which means so much to
you is not a thing which can be tested or proved by any form
of demonstration ; you believe in the person who so domi-
nates your life, and it is the very fact that your belief in him
has an element of uncertainty in it that makes the whole thing
worth while. A person might play you false, might prove
unworthy of your admiration; it is precisely that "might"
which makes the thing worth while. It is because you are
uncertain that it is possible for you to have faith ; and with
that faith happiness comes into your life, and you find a new
attitude towards the world.

Or again the faith on which a man relies, the star to which
he hitches his waggon, may be a philosophy, a system of
beliefs. Ordinarily he will describe this as a religion, especially
in England, where almost anything will pass for a religion.
Even the people who believe that the earth is flat regard
themselves, I understand, as a religious sect. (By the way,
those people are a very good example of how it is possible
to have faith in a thing which, for you, is a matter of proof,
though one which cannot actually be tested. They think they
can prove that the earth is flat, and they will talk to you by

Faith Lost and Found 103

the hour about it ; and yet, because they find so many people
difficult to convince on the point, they adhere to their beliefs
withpositive fanaticism.) But it is not necessary that the philo-
sophy which makes a man's life worth living for him should
be a religious philosophy. And the strangest proof of that is
that a small handful of people who really think they can prove
that there is no God are prepared to preach that doctrine and
write books about it and edit newspapers about it, for all the
world as if it was a religion. And those people, so oddly con-
stituted is the human mind, do really derive from their
absence of religion something of the satisfaction of feeling
they are crusaders.

Or the faith by which a man lives may be faith in a cause or
a movement, an institution of some kind whose influence he
devotes himself to spreading and popularizing. A political
party, or a nationalist movement, or a temperance agitation,
or even something quite dull and uninspiring like free-
masonry may be the mainspring of his life ; it does not matter,
you see, so long as there is something outside himself to which
he can devote himself, a thing whose advantages are not so
obvious to the world in general as they are to himself.

Now, those of us who are baptized and brought up as
Catholics are in this position of advantage, that instead of
having to look about the world and find for ourselves some
loyalty which will make life worth living for us, we are pro-
vided, from our cradle upwards, with such a loyalty all ready
made. It does not in the least prevent us from adopting other
loyalties if we will, from attaching ourselves to any reputable
movement or adhering to any sensible philosophy. But it
makes that unnecessary ; so long as we retain the Catholic
faith we have always one interest, one loyalty, one enthusiasm
in the world to keep us alive. And the faith, you see, is some-
thing much bigger than a mere philosophy. It does commit us
to a philosophy ; but it does also take us out of ourselves by

104 In Soft Garments

throwing our reliance on a Personality, the Personality of
Jesus Christ ; it does also take us out of ourselves by identi-
fying us with a movement, whose triumphs are our triumphs,
whose anxieties are our anxieties ; life can never be dull for us
while the Church is still militant, still has a battle to fight and
a position to be vindicated.

I say the faith is something much bigger than a mere
philosophy ; it involves us in a special attitude towards this
world and the world to come. It engages not our minds
merely but our whole selves. Yet it depends and must depend
from first to last upon an intellectual conviction. It is true that
there are certain Nonconformist sects which practically invite
you to rely on the Personality of our Lord without ever
stopping to consider whether he was Incarnate God or not. It
is true that there are politicians, the Action Frangaise group,
for example, who invite you to admire the Church and to
fight for its ascendancy without caring in the least whether
the Christian religion is true. But those are aberrations of
human sentiment ; as a matter of common sense no thinking
man will make Christ the centre of his life unless he is intel-
lectually convinced that Christ was God, or will make the
Church the focus of his loyalties unless he is intellectually con-
vinced that the Church's origins are divine.

Faith, then, in its central essence, presupposes a judgment
of the intellect, a judgment first that God exists; next that
he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, and finally that the
Catholic Church is the accredited vehicle of Christ's revela-
tion, and that what she teaches comes to us, consequently,
with that certainty which belongs to the Voice of God. But is
faith merely an intellectual calculation? It cannot, obviously,
be that ; faith is a virtue, and there can be no virtue in making
a mathematical computation ; faith is a quality that is more
vivid in some Christians than in others, and there could be no
such difference of degree if nothing more were demanded of

Faith Lost and Found 105

us Christians than a bare intellectual assent. And accordingly
the Church, though she will not say with the early Protestants
that faith is a quality which is centred in the will, teaches that
this quality, centred as it is in the intellect, is nevertheless
under the direction of the will. Now, how is that possible?
If the Catholic religion is reasonable, how can faith come into
it at all? And if it is unreasonable, how can we possibly be
justified in making an act of the will which enables us to
believe in it?

The answer to that may sound illogical, but nothing is
more certain as a matter of experience than this that where
we are asked to form a judgment which is based on any kind
of hearsay evidence, we shall not have the energy, or if you
will, the courage, to form such a judgment unless we are pre-
pared to make an effort of the will. However fully you read
the report of a trial, or the sources for some period of history,
you may still be tempted, through prejudice, to withhold
your assent from the conclusions, although you can find no
flaw in the process ; to overcome that prejudice will need an
act of the will. And even where no positive prejudice is at
work, there is a prejudice which lurks deep in our natures at
all times, partly from a kind of indolence and partly from a
kind of cowardice a prejudice, I mean, against affirming
anything, against identifying ourselves with a positive judg-
ment, when it is so much simpler to take refuge in humming
and hawing and saying, * * Yes, I suppose so." There is all the
difference in the world, practically, between saying, "Yes, I
suppose that is true, 5 ' and saying, "By Gad, that's true!" And
the difference between the two attitudes arises, really, not out
of the strength of the evidence before us, but out of our will-
ingness to identify ourselves with the judgment which our
reason ratifies. It ought not to be so ; it would not be so if
we were mere thinking machines; but we are not mere
thinking machines, and for that reason it takes an act of the

io6 In Soft Garments

will, however slight, before we can affirm something which,
although it is not self-evident, we can nevertheless see to be
true.

Faith comes in to encourage us, when we are hesitating to
make an afGrmation ; and that is why we can say that faith is a
gift there is a bestowal of grace which confirms our wills,
and makes it possible for us to assert, and to go on asserting,
truths of religion over which, if we were left to our indolent
and cowardly selves, we might be tempted to suspend judg-
ment. That is why faith can be exercised in equal measure,
and is needed in equal measure, by a trained theologian and
by a simple peasant. If faith were a mere affair of the intellect,
then the theologian would need a greater measure of faith, or
at least a different kind of faith, as compared with the peasant.
But it is not so ; either needs the same gift, either has die same
moral responsibility that of asserting positively what he sees
to be true, and identifying himself whole-heartedly with the
assertion. The theologian understands the doctrine with all its
niceties and interpretations, as far as it is possible for the
human mind to understand such things ; the peasant under-
stands it in terms of his own thought, using crude analogies
and words inadequate to the situation. But either needs, and
either might lose, the gift of faith which transforms, for him,
a mere intellectual conclusion into a conviction which is really
part of himself.

Now, there are two ways in which the faith can be lost.
One is by altering your intellectual conclusions until they are
no longer in harmony with Christian doctrine, without pay-
ing attention to what you are doing. That means that you lose
the faith piecemeal ; you slip into habits of thought which are
inconsistent with Christian theology, although you go on
professing to be a Christian all the time ; pride, or carelessness,
prevents you from seeing where it is that your own thought is
leading you. That is what happened, I suppose, to George

Faith Lost and Found 107

Tyrrell; anybody could have told Mm that the modernist
conclusions he was reaching were unsound theology, and
would be condemned as soon as anybody took the trouble to
condemn them. But he went on, and when the condemnation
of his views came, he realized that he had drifted gradually
away until his whole mind was utterly out of sympathy with
Catholic teaching. That happens, chiefly, to professional
theologians, and especially to those whose business it is to
explain Catholic theology to people outside the Church. But
there is a danger of its happening to ordinary people, and for
that reason I do implore you, as Catholics who are living to
some extent in an atmosphere of thought, and uncommonly
unorthodox thought, to take an intellectual interest in your
religion ; to know what it teaches, and why it teaches what it
does and what answer it makes to the sceptical objections
which are launched against its doctrines from outside.

But there is another way of losing your faith, which I
suppose is much commoner, and it is this. You do not find
difficulties about this or that doctrine, quarrel with this or
that affirmation made by the Catholic Church. No, you seem
to lose all at once that faculty of affirming truth, of making its
assertions your own, which we have seen to be involved in
the nature of faith. It is not exactly that the motives for believ-
ing in God's existence, or our Lord's Divinity, or the
Church's infallibility, look any different to you now as com-
pared with the way they looked yesterday ; no, the whole
thing looks probable enough, if you force yourself to face the
issue, but it does not grip you, does not mean anything to you
your will has altered, not your intellect. You still hold the
truth in your hand, but you no longer grasp it.

People suggest that you should read books ; you reply that
apologetic writings in favour of the Church may, perhaps,
appeal to you merely as intellectual statements, but they do
not restore to you the power you have lost the power of

io8 In Soft Garments

affirming the truth of these supernatural facts which come to
you on the authority of the Church. What is to be done then?
I will venture to face that point, in case there should be any-
one here who finds himself in that despairing position, or is in
fear that he may fall into it should his present tendencies of
of thought go on undisturbed.

It is a rude thing to say, because it is always a rude thing to
remind people of their age ; but a certain obscuration of the
faith is common in your circumstances and at your time of
life. There are a multitude of causes which we have no time
to discuss, physical, mental, local; but it is a fact of common
knowledge that faith becomes less vivid, for most people, at a
time of life when they have no longer the boy's capacity for
swallowing anything he is told without thinking about it, and
have not yet reached the age when the urgency of living and
the experience of human insufficiency drives them back on
the thought of God. Nobody has put it better than Mr Belloc,
in a passage which most of you probably know: "Belief/'
he says, "of its nature breeds a reaction and an indifference.
Those who believe nothing, but only think and judge, cannot
understand this. Of its nature it struggles with us. And we,
when our youth is full on us, invariably reject it and set out
in the sunlight content with natural things. Then for a long
time we are like men who follow the downward cleft of a
mountain, and the peaks are hidden from us and forgotten.
It takes years to reach the dry plain, and then we look back
and see our home. What is it, do you think, that causes the
return? I think it is the problem of living; for every day,
every experience of evil, demands a solution. That solution is
provided by the memory of the great scheme which at last we
remember. Our childhood pierces through again."

And therefore if you will pardon me for making such an
irreverent attack on your self-confidence do not be too
ready to believe, just because you find your interest in religion

Faith Lost and Found 109

waning, that this is loss of faith, or even the beginnings of a
loss of faith. It is not really your faith that is tending to disap-
pear ; it is merely your boyhood's faculty for taking things for
granted, and that is a very different thing from faith. Do not
be tempted, for example, to give up attending Mass, with the
reflection that it would be hypocrisy for you to go in your
present state of mind. That is to assume that your mind has
already reached its final position ; believe me, you have a long
way to travel, for better or for worse, before your thought
will become fixed in the groove of a lifetime. And, in the
same way, do not give up the practice of saying your prayers.
It may be that heaven seems more distant to you than it did ;
all is not with you as it was yesterday and the day before ; but
that obscuration of belief will be only temporary, if you will
be true to God, and hold on to your faith in the dark.

Here is another suggestion, which may not be without its
value if you find yourself thus apparently deserted by the
light of faith, do not fluster and baffle your imagination by
presenting to it all the most difficult doctrines of the Chris-
tian religion, those which unbelievers find it easiest to attack;
do not be for ever asking yourself, " Can I really believe that
marriage is indissoluble? Can I really believe that it is possible
to go to hell as the punishment of one mortal sin?" Keep
your attention fixed on the main point, which is a single
point Can I trust the Catholic Church as the final reposi-
tory of revealed truth? If you can, all the rest follows, if you
cannot, it makes little difference what else you believe, or
disbelieve*

XIII
THE UNCONSCIOUS CATHOLIC

| VERY Sunday, more or less, you are told how
fortunate you are to be Catholics. And it is
almost impossible for us, in listening to such
expositions, not to be held up occasionally
by a distracting thought: "That's all very
well, and it seems full of consolations for us ; but after all, what
about the other people? Most of us here are going about all
day with people who aren't Catholics and aren't, as far as we
can see, even on the way to becoming Catholics. They are
nice people, good-living people many of them ; nearly all, if
you come to look beneath the surface, have excellent qualities
tucked away; where exactly do they get off? Is there no
chance for them in eternity? And if there is, how much of a
chance is it, and how does it come to them? If we are going
to accept the doctrine as apparently we must accept it, Extra
eccksiam nulla salus, isn't it going to make us feel rather un-
happy about our non-Catholic friends ? " So I thought I would
devote this morning to a consideration of that question. It is
all familiar ground, I hope, to most of you ; and it is pretty
dull going. But it is important, I think, to have an answer
to such difficulties as these, ready for those occasions when
our Protestant friends say, "Of course, you think I'm going
to hell; you have to." Let's just make certain that we don't
lay ourselves open to the charge of stuffiness on the one side,
or land ourselves in theological misstatements on the other.

no

The Unconscious Catholic

in

The gateway of all sacramental grace, as we know, is
baptism. First of all, then, what is the position of the un-
baptized? After all, for innumerable centuries before Christ
the human race had to get on without the sacrament of bap-
tism, and even now there are plenty of people in the world
who have never had the chance of being baptized. If it comes
to that, there are probably a good many of our friends who
have never been baptized; the Jews and the Quakers for
example, and the people whose parents didn't hold with
going to church at all. Well, when you are considering
people like that, it is very important to keep two principles in
mind. One is, that baptism is not necessarily baptism by
water ; there is such a thing as baptism of desire. It is quite
certain, I mean, that a person who at the time of his death
was anxious to be baptized, but could find nobody to do it for
him or no water to do it with, would nevertheless become a
member of Christ's Mystical Body through his desire of bap-
tism. And we can't, evidently, be certain how far that prin-
ciple may not extend; it's certain that the Holy Patriarchs
who died in the hope of a Messiah were saved through that
hope, and it isn't for us to say how many of the heathen may
have been saved through some distant inkling of the same
truth; may not be saved in that way even now, provided
that the chance of embracing the Christian religion has never
effectively come in their way.

And that's where the other principle comes in ; it's quite
certain that nobody ever has gone to hell or ever will go to hell
except through his own fault. It's not the legacy of original
sin, it's one's own actual sins, that bring the sentence of eternal
reprobation. And if it's true that all men sin, it is equally true
that contrition is open to all men as a remedy for sin. There-
fore we've no right to assume that anybody has been eternally
lost because there is no record in his life that he ever had or
desired baptism. I should certainly be very much surprised if

H2 In Soft Garments

1 found myself in a heaven which, didn't contain Socrates and
Plato and Virgil and plenty of other people who, at first sight,
would have no right to be there. How it is that such souls
come to be saved we don't know. Some have thought that at
the very moment of death, and perhaps even after the
moment at which a doctor would give a certificate of medical
death, an illumination is given to them which, if they accept
it, will achieve the baptism of desire. Others prefer to think
that the desire of baptism can be implicitly contained in an
act of love towards God, even an act that is confused, even an
act that is inarticulate. We don't know ; all we do know is,
that it is theologically indefensible to say of any man, Nero,
for example, or Mahomet, "That man went to hell"; we've
no right, even in the extreme case, to despair of God's infinite
mercies.

All that, as you see, is only a kind of Christian agnosticism.
But when we come on to the case of people who have been
baptized but don't ever become Catholics, our ground is
much more certain. Every child that is baptized becomes,
ipso facto, not only a Christian but a Catholic. A child that dies
unbaptized, having done nothing to deserve eternal punish-
ment, will enjoy, according to the more common opinion, a
state of natural happiness in eternity which falls short, indeed,
of the supernatural happiness reserved for Christ's elect, but is
nevertheless adequate to its human aspirations, A child which
dies after baptism cannot be supposed to achieve the bright-
ness of glory which belongs to those who have striven, and
merited, and obtained. But it belongs to the Mystical Body of
Christ, and wins its heaven.

Now, supposing that the child lives, how long does it go on
being a Catholic ? Until it reaches the age of reason ; it is quite
certain that there are no Protestants in the world under the
age of five. You cease to be a Catholic only when, with the
full use of your reason, you consent, at least externally, to

The Unconscious Catholic 113

embrace the beliefs of some other religion ; or when you
begin to hold, with the full use of your reason, philosophical
beliefs opposed to the doctrines of the Church. If you could
imagine a child that was baptized and then grew up without
giving a single thought to religion for better or worse that
child has become, in strict theory, a very slack Catholic ; not
a Protestant. And in strict theory, if such a person wanted to
join this congregation at the age of nineteen, say, he ought to
be given conditional baptism in case his baptism in childhood
was for some reason invalid ; but he oughtn't to be received
into the Church with the official form for the reception of
converts. Because that form is essentially a renunciation of
errors; and the person in question, ex hypothesi, has never
held any.

What normally happens, of course, is that the child grows
up to be seven or eight, and then he is packed off to Sunday
school and starts learning to be a Protestant. Whether you
say that he does so willingly is, of course, a matter of defini-
tion ; probably he kicks a good deal at first, especially if it
means putting on a clean collar. But the fact remains that he
goes ; in doing so, does he commit a sin of schism? Materially
he does, formally he does not. Let us get those two terms
right, because the common instinct of English speech is to
use them the wrong way round. If you eat, on a Friday,
out of a jar which is labelled POTTED SHRIMP but which
really contains the remains of a cab-horse, you are com-
mitting a material sin by eating meat on a Friday, but you
are not committing a formal sin, because you had no way
of knowing that the cab-horse was there. And, of course,
although you may mention it in confession if you find out
about it afterwards, you are not bound to confess it, nor will it
be brought up against you at the day of judgment ; a sin does
not lie upon your conscience unless you are conscious of
committing it, and it is by your conscience that you will be

1 14 In Soft Garments

judged. Similarly, the ordinary Englishman who has been
validly baptized proceeds, later in life, to join in worship
which is, as matter of fact, heretical and schismatical ; but he
is not blamed for it in the sight of God, because he has not,
then at least, any means of finding out that he is doing so.
The sin is merely a material one. Mark you, we no longer
describe him as a Catholic ; because we have to judge whether
a person is or is not a Catholic by his outward actions. But
has he ceased to be a member of the Mystical Body of Christ?
No ; not at least while he makes faithful use of the opportuni-
ties he has of worshipping God, according to the light given
him. That means that there are quantities and quantities of
people who, as far as we can determine, are already members
of the Mystical Body of Christ without knotting it.

And now, how is it possible for such a person to lose that
unconscious membership of Christ's Church? He can, of
course, suspend the operation of grace, just as we Catholics
can, if he commits mortal sin. On the other hand, he regains
his lost state of grace if lie makes an act of perfect contrition,
just as a Catholic does. Only, whereas the Catholic is bound
to make his sin known in confession, even though by God's
grace it may already have been forgiven him, a Protestant is
not so bound, because he either knows nothing about con-
fession, or thinks that he can satisfy his obligation by confess-
ing his sins to an Anglican clergyman, or to his friends in the
groups. But there's another way in which he can lose his
membership of the Mystical Body. He does so when the
claims of the Catholic Church are fully proposed to him, and
he sees that they are justified, but does not become a Catholic
in spite of Ms knowledge. Pride, or indolence, or the hope of
worldly advantage prevents him from taking the step which
his conscience knows to be right. Then, in that hour, he
becomes a heretic and a schismatic, formaEy as well as
materially ; he has refused grace.

The Unconscious Catholic 115

Are there many people in that position? I don't know ; my
own impression is that there are very few Protestants who
are Protestants in bad faith. They are in good faith, so long as
they remain outside the Church through invincible ignor-
ance. That's a phrase of ours that worries people frightfully;
when we tell them they are the victims of invincible ignor-
ance, they always look as if we had said something rude. But
if you are arguing with a friend, and are driven to tell him in
the last resort that invincible ignorance is what he is suffering
from, don't let him go away with the impression that you are
being rude, and that invincible ignorance means a sort of
cretinous stupidity. If you've got a tutorial at six, and your
watch tells you it's half-past five, and you're pretty sure your
watch is wrong, and there's a clock in the next room you
know to be right then that ignorance of the time which
makes you half an hour or so late for your tutorial is not
invincible ignorance. It is vincible ignorance ; you could have
overcome it if you had taken the trouble to look at the clock
in the next room. So your friend's ignorance would be vin-
cible, if he already had a pretty shrewd idea that the Catholic
position was right, but refused to read the C.T.S. tracts you
offered him because he jolly well knew he was going to lose a
legacy if he became a Catholic. But that's not his position ;
a hundred accidents of parentage, education, misconception,
sentimental prejudice and so on make him so far from, the
Church that his conversion would seem a kind of miracle ; he
really knows nothing about Catholics except that you are
one, which may or may not be an inducement very well,
his ignorance is invincible. It is the kind of ignorance he could
not get rid of by taking any steps which he could normally be
expected to take. So he's all right.

By now, as I well know, you are all bursting with an
objection. It always crops up in these discussions. If (you say)
this rosy picture of yours, is true about the dispositions of

n6 In Soft Garments

Protestants and their chances of eternal salvation, what
exactly is the use of being a Catholic? Aren't Catholics, by
your account of the matter, rather in the position of men who
laboriously climb up the rugged slopes of a mountain, to find
when they got to die top that their Protestant friends have
got ahead of them by means of a funicular railway whose
existence they themselves had never been taught to suspect?
Here am I (you complain) tied down by all sorts of restric-
tions and regulations which interfere seriously with my
enjoyment of the present life ; and here are these Protestants,
invincibly ignorant of all these rules and regulations, and
therefore having all the fun which I miss, and no worse off
when it comes to a future life than myself? Your attitude, in
fact, is very much that of the labourers in the vineyard whom
we read about in the Gospel, who complained that they had
borne all the burden of the day and the heats, and at the end
of it found themselves on exactly the same footing as the
casual labourers who had been raked in from the market-
place at the last moment.

Well, that opens up rather a large subject. You see, it isn't
true that Protestants are exempt from the law of Go J, from
the Ten Commandments for instance ; and it isn't true that
Protestants can be invincibly ignorant, to a full extent, of
what God's law requires of them. Their consciences are
doubdess confused ; but don't be too ready to believe them
when they say they see no harm in doing this or that which
you know to be wrong. There's a very great deal of self-
deception going about, when people say they "see no harm"
in doing something they very much want to ; it's not invin-
cible ignorance when a man puts blinkers on his conscience.
We are not to judge our Protestant friends in such cases ;
judgment lies with Almighty God, to whom each soul is
responsible. But you mustn't think it true for a moment, or
allow other people to think it true for a moment, that there is

The Unconscious Catholic 117

one Divine Law for Catholics and another for Protestants.
However, that takes us away from our subject. Let us admit
that where the law of the Church is concerned you are bound
and your Protestant friends are not. They can do certain
things which you can't do ; they can eat a mutton-chop on a
Friday, they can be Freemasons, they can get married in a
registry office, they can leave directions in their wills to say
they want to be cremated, and so on. From all these riotous
pleasures you are excluded. And you want to know whether
it isn't bad luck you should be excluded when they aren't. Or,
putting the thing in a rather more altruistic way, why (you
ask) should we bother to convert Protestants ? Since they are
in good faith, wouldn't it be better to leave them in good
faith, and let them get to heaven in their own way, mutton-
chops and all?

The immediate answer to that difficulty is this that
although we ought always to hope, for the sake of charity,
that this or that Protestant is in good faith, we can't be sure
that he is in good faith, nor, for that matter, can he. Therefore
we should always encourage the conversion of a Protestant,
if only for safety's sake. But, you know, even if you could be
certain that some friend of yours was in good faith, and was
on the whole a clean-living sort of person, so that there was
no great reason to worry about him, it isn't true to say that
you and he enjoy exactly the same supernatural advantages.
First, you have the certainty of the faith ; you are spared the
anxious uncertainties which often assail him.; he's not certain
whether there is a future life, whether this life's worth living,
whether anything you do or say really matters much from
those doubts you are set free. Second, you have access,where
he has no access, to sacramental grace; he can win forgiveness
for his sins (for example) only by an act of perfect contrition,
and who can be certain that he is making an act of perfect
contrition? "Whereas for you attrition suffices, as long as you

1 1 8 In Soft Garments

make use of the sacrament of penance. Third, you have the
merits of the Church at your disposal ; you can go out to
Rome in the vac. and get a plenary indulgence, or (if your
dispositions are not sufficient for that) an indulgence of some
kind; he can go out to Kamschatka and he won't get off a
day's Purgatory for it. The reason why you don't realize your
privileges as Catholics is because you don't use them more.

As a matter of fact, even if there were no heaven and no
hell, it would still be our duty to try and convert heretics,
even those who are only in material heresy, for a different
reason that truth is truth, and has a right to be told. Spiritual
truth,which is the highest of all, is something we must neces-
sarily want to impart to other people if we possess it ourselves.
I don't mean by that that I want you to go straight back to
your College and try and convert the two people you are
sitting next to in Hall. Indiscriminate attempts to convert
other people mean, at the best, that you give people a dislike
for Catholicism ; at the worst, that you shake what faith they
have in Christianity altogether, so that the last state of them is
worse than the first. No, your duty is to defend the faith to
the best of your power where you can see it is being mis-
represented, and to help your friends when they begin to take
an interest in the Catholic religion, by lending them books,
by introducing them to a priest, or in some similar way.

There's one other point. If you are asked, "What is the
exact meaning of the maxim, No salvation outside the Catholic
Church" what are you to say about it? The simplest way to
put it, I think, is this there is no other religious body in the
world except the Catholic Church which makes a super-
natural contribution to a man's chances of salvation. He may
receive natural help from some other source ; his conscience
may be stirred by the preaching of the Salvation Army, or he
may learn a useful habit of mental prayer from the Buch-
manites, or his sense of worship may be stimulated by the

The Unconscious Catholic 119

beauty of the ceremonies which he witnesses at the Church of
the Cowley Fathers. But there's only one religious body
whose membership, of itself, tends to procure our salvation,
and that is the Catholic Church. If anybody is saved without
visible membership of it he is saved, not because he's an
AngHcan, not because he's a Methodist, not because he's a
Quaker, but for one reason only because he is a Catholic
without knowing it.

XIV
INTO ALL TRUTH

[HEN we say that the Church continues on
earth the teaching work of her divine
Founder, what picture are we to form in our
minds of this, her teaching office? Are we to
_ think of her as having received, once and for
all, an inalienable and unalterable deposit of infallible doctrine,
with no power to add to it, or take away from it, even to in-
terpret it? Or are we to think of her as not only continuing
to teach, but continuing to learn ; as becoming aware, with
the slow lapse of the centuries, of fresh truths, or at least fresh
implications of the truth, so that the content of revelation
does not remain static, but expands as the years go on, and
promises an ever-increasing harvest of spiritual insight? Is
the truth which the Church proclaims something which she
has known all along, or something which she is gradually
coming to know?

It is a curious point, which has not, I think, received the
remark it deserves, that in the answer which it gives to that
question Protestant theology has, within the last hundred
years or so, completely boxed the compass. A hundred years
ago, at the time when the Oxford Movement started, I think
you can say that the vast majority of people in England who
valued their reputation for orthodoxy and at that date a
great many people did thought of Christian truth as a fixed
body of doctrines which had always been held in the Church,

I2O

Into all Truth 121

and, lest they should be obscured through the lapse of time or
through human subtlety, had all been written down some-
where or other in the books of the New Testament, too plain
for anybody to miss them. The plain sense of Scripture that
is what they appealed to. Actually, of course, there is no plain
sense of Scripture, and they were basing their tradition on the
early fathers of the Church much more than they knew. But
their appeal was always to the primitive, to the uncorrupted
Church, and to the New Testament as the supreme test of
what that Church taught.

For example, if you had asked in Protestant Oxford a hun-
dred years ago whether eternal punishment existed in the next
world, everybody, except perhaps a handful of dangerous
liberals, would have replied, "Yes, of course." No matter
whether you were High Church or Low Church, no matter
whether you were Evangelical or Tractarian, you believed in
eternal punishment because it was obviously the belief of the
early Church, of the aposdes, nay, of our Lord himself. Or
again, if you had raised the question in Oxford a hundred
years ago whether it was possible for a Christian to obtain a
divorce in the full sense, to be rid of one marriage which had
turned out unhappily, and free to marry again, the answer
would have been an tutmistakeable "No." What God hath
joined, let not man put asunder ; the wife is bound as long as
her husband liveth the New Testament was clear on the
point; or, if there was a little confusion introduced by the
difference of wording in St Matthew, the comments of the
early fathers were enough to put that all right. The Christian
tradition on the subject was clear, and the Church had
nothing to do but to declare it. No new light could possibly
be forthcoming on the subject; you would have to be a
Quaker or an Anabaptist to suppose that it could.

Whereas, if you study any of the pronouncements of
modern Protestant theology, you will find that its tone is

122 In Soft Garments

exactly the opposite. It doesn't matter at what level you study
the thing, whether in the careful pastorals of Anglican
bishops or in the crude religiosity of the newspapers. Always
you will get the impression that Christian theology is not
something once for all delivered to the saints, and therefore
fixed for all time; it is something which "the Church" is
making up as it goes along. What precisely they mean by the
Church it is not quite kind to enquire ; but that is the assump-
tion. "More and more we are coming to see that," "thought-
ful Christians nowadays are at one in believing that,"
" modem speculation has no room for the mediaeval idea
that" those are the rubrics under which religious truth is
now presented to us. And there are half a dozen texts which
are continually being quoted in support of such an attitude:
"the Spirit shall guide you into all truth/' "all thy people
shall be taught of God," "he that doeth the works shall know
the doctrine," and so on. We are learning all the time, these
people would have us believe, in theology quite as much as in
any other science ; and you would no more expect St Thomas
or John Calvin to have said the last word, for example, about
the Holy Eucharist, any more than you would expect Boyle
to have said the last word about gases, or Darwin about
biology.

And when you put a concrete question to these Protestants
of our own day, you feel far less certain as to what the answer
will be. Some of them do still believe in the doctrine of
eternal punishment, but most of them will tell you that we
have given up believing in all that kind of thing now. Belief
in eternal punishment was only a stage through which Chris-
tian thought had to pass ; necessary perhaps to its develop-
ment, but something which we have quite outgrown in these
more enlightened days. The Church, which was once in-
spired by the Holy Ghost to believe in eternal punishment,
has now received an even better inspiration from the Holy

Into all Truth 123

Ghost to believe that there is no such thing. And even in
practical matters, even over a question like divorce, you will
find the same weakening process beginning to set in among
the Protestant theologians ; they want the innocent party at
any rate to be dealt with mildly in such cases quite oblivious
of the fact that nowadays the innocent party is as a rule the
guilty one. Mark you, I'm not talking only of the people
who belong to the Modern Churchmen's Union. Quite High
Church people, who regard themselves as the legitimate
successors of the Tractarians, will tell you that Catholic truth
is not a revelation which we possess already, but a revelation
which is gradually being disclosed to us through the action of
the Holy Spirit in the Church. The exact opposite of what
they used to tell us a hundred years ago.

And then, of course, as so often happens when people have
completely boxed the compass in their own thought, they
turn on us and attack our position from an angle diametrically
opposed to that from which we were hitherto accustomed to
defend it. They used to say, I mean, a hundred years ago,
"What blasphemous, superstitious, new-fangled people you
Roman Catholics are, believing a whole lot of things which
the early Church had never heard of, instead of sticking to the
good, safe old ways ! Your doctrine of the Immaculate Con-
ception, for example you went and introduced that in the
middle of the nineteenth century ; the early Fathers never
mention it at all. Don't you realize that it is quite impossible
for the Holy Ghost to tell us anything which he hasn't been
telling us for the last nineteen hundred years?" And then,
before we had finished telling them all about St Irenaeus and
the doctrine of the second Eve, we suddenly found that the
wind was blowing from another quarter, and we were being
roundly abused for believing in the doctrine of original sin.
"What stupid, pedantic, old-fashioned people you Roman
Catholics must be," they were now saying, "believing a

124 In Soft Garments

whole lot of nonsense which was believed by the early
Church, as if everything stood still, and we hadn't learnt any
lessons in theology since! This doctrine of original sin, for
example of course, it was good enough for the primitive,
untutored minds of Irenaeus and his contemporaries ; but you
must surely realize that the Holy Ghost has been teaching us a
lot of things since then? In particular, that the Fall wasn't
really a fall ; that the human race has been steadily developing
upwards ever since its monkey days, and consequently the
whole notion of original sin has to be set aside as a notion
which was useful in its time, to express the limited theological
ideas of the first ages, but is grotesquely antiquated now?"
And so we had to start all over again, from a fresh angle.

Mr Belloc told me he was once walking with a friend in
London, and they passed by a navvy who was digging up the
road, and had paused to swear pretty freely at a bystander
who had been rude to him. And Mr Belloc's friend said,
** What an extraordinary thing it is that nine out of every ten
Englishmen believe that that man was immaculately
conceived!"

Well, what is our position about it all? Do we think of
Catholic truth as something which has been revealed finally,
once for all, when our Lord founded his Church? Or do we
think of it as a growing body of truth, made known to us by
successive revelations from the Holy Spirit, who has never
ceased to dwell in and to energize his Church? The answer is
that both those statements are true; and the harmonizing of
those two statements is at once a very delicate and a very
necessary piece of theological reasoning. We do believe that
the whole of Christian truth was made known by our Lord to
his apostles. Not, mark you, that it was all written down, fully
at least, in the pages of the New Testament. We know from
St Luke that our Lord, between his Resurrection and his
Ascension, appeared to his disciples over a period of forty

Into all Truth 125

days, speaking to them of die things which concerned the
kingdom of God. Only scattered fragments of that teaching
remain on record ; and yet, if you come to think of it, how
closely the apostles must have questioned our Lord about all
the theological issues which puzzled them; how carefully
they must have treasured the words that fell from his lips,
when he was so soon to leave them ! It is chiefly, we must sup-
pose, in the teaching of those forty days that the tradition of
Christian doctrine, which has come down by unimpaired
succession to our own days, is ultimately rooted. On the other
hand, our Lord did promise that his Spirit should teach them
all things, and bring all things to their remembrance, what-
ever he had said to them. Something, then, remained to be
accomplished, if those early lessons were to take shape and
achieve clearness of outline ; if they were to maintain them-
selves against the altered conditions which later times would
bring. The centuries, somehow, were to set their stamp on the
deposit of faith. How exactly, and why exactly, did that
happen?

The easiest way to understand it is perhaps by reference to
the analogy of ordinary human law, and the way in which
statute laW grows in volume, and yet does not grow in
extent, as successive decisions in case law define its meaning.
Let us suppose, for example, that there is a law on the statute
book there may be, for all I know that none of the King's
subjects, except when he is on military service, may go about
carrying weapons. There is a strict school of interpretation,
which says that this law obviously forbids you to carry a
walking-stick. Somebody is prosecuted for carrying a walk-
ing-stick, and acquitted. There is a lax school of interpreta-
tion, which says diat, of course, there is no harm in carrying a
caj^dng-knife ; that is not meant for wounding one's fellow-
citizens, only for cutting up meat. A man is prosecuted for
carrying a carving-knife, and condemned. Now, in a sense

126 In Soft Garments

the law has grown in volume ; there is more stuff to be read
up in the legal textbooks. Instead of merely learning that the
law does not allow men to carry weapons, you have to learn
that the law does not allow men to carry carving-knives, but
does allow men to carry walking-sticks. Yet the law has not
really grown in extent; no addition has been made to it,
nothing has been subtracted from it. All that has happened is
that the law has been interpreted, in the sense in which it was
obviously meant to be interpreted; its scope has not been
extended, but its meaning has been more accurately defined*

So it is that Christian theology grows, and yet does not
grow, with the centuries. Somebody produces an explanation
of some Christian doctrine which is obviously a disingenuous
explanation, an attempt to explain it away. There is friction
and debate; perhaps a rival school grows up which threatens,
by reaction, to overstate the case on the other side. Then, if
the disputants on either side stick obstinately to their opinions,
the Church is called upon to define the issue ; and in doing so
she invokes the aid of the Holy Spirit, asking him to guide her
into all truth; asking him to remind her what exactly it was
our Lord taught her, in those distant days by the sea of Gali-
lee. And when she has framed her definition, the truth of
Christian doctrine remains what it was; nothing has been
added to it, nothing has been subtracted from it. But it has
grown in clearness ; what was once held by the faithful as a
confused truth stands out more luminous, has sharper edges ;
in that sense, Christian theology has been enriehed.

It is not difficult to choose examples which will illustrate
that principle. Let me speak of two which we shall be com-
memorating only a few days from now.

The earliest Christians knew well enough that the Divine
Nature was single, indivisible, and unique; to say that there
were two Gods or three Gods would be blasphemy, a relapse
into paganism. On the other hand, they believed firmly in

Into all Truth 127

God die Father, like the Jews before them. ; they believed that
our Lord Jesus Christ was God ; and they believed that the
Holy Spirit, sent to them from both, was God. I will pray the
Father, and he will send you another Comforter three
Persons are in question there. On the other hand, I and the
Father are one somehow, Trinity and Unity are recon-
cilable. Then came the age of die great heresies ; Anus tried to
explain away the mystery by denying the Godhead of
Christ ; Macedonius, by denying the Godhead of the Holy
Spirit ; Sabellius, by making out that the distinction between
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit was only a distinction
of functions or aspects. So it was that the Church had to call
to her aid philosophical distinctions, hitherto unfamiliar;
she could only safeguard the truth once for all delivered
to her against sophistical interpretation by making a new
definition ; there were three Persons in the Godhead, but only
one Divine Substance. She did not alter her belief, or add to
it, or abandon anything of it; she only sharpened the sword
of truth to give it a keener edge against error.

That was only three or four centuries after Christ; the
doctrine of the Holy Eucharist remained much longer in its
unformed state, because theologians had not yet arisen to
exercise their subtleties on it. There could be no doubt at all
that what the priest held in his hands was the Body of Christ,
that what the Chalice contained was the Blood of Christ ; he
himself had said so, who could neither deceive nor be
deceived. Yet there was no doubt that what the priest held
retained the appearance of bread, that what was in the
Chalice still looked and still tasted like wine ; you could not
deny the evidence of your own senses. The* two truths must
be held together, as mysteriously coexisting. Then, at last,
attempts were made to explain away the doctrine by suppos-
ing that the words of Institution were only symbolic, that no
real change was effected when the consecration took place.

128 In Soft Garments

And once more the Church had to make use of philosophical
distinctions which till then had not seemed necessary; to
explain that what was present was the very substance of our
Lord's Body and Blood, although the accidents proper to
bread and wine remained unaltered. Once more, there was
no addition, no alteration ; after the fourth Lateran Council
as before it the Church held the faith which her Master had
delivered to her ; only she held it in more precise terms, only
with less risk, henceforward, of being misrepresented or
misunderstood.

When we say, then, that the teaching of the Church is the
teaching of Christ, we mean two things. In the first place,
that the substance of what we assert comes down to us, by
continuous tradition, from his own teaching given to his
aposdes. In the second place that the formulae in which our
belief is enshrined are the only true interpretation of his
meaning, guaranteed to us by his promise that his Holy Spirit
would guide the Church into all truth.

XV
THE KEY MAN

| HE Council of Trent, although its delibera-
tions are portentous in their bulk, and occupy
just one-tenth of the whole number of pages
in Denzinger's Handbook of the Creeds and

Definitions oj the Church^ didn't discuss the

question ofthe Pope's primacy at all. In spite of all the trouble
with the mediaeval councils, in spite of all the bitter attacks
made by Luther and the Reformers upon the Papacy, the
Council of Trent didn't think it worth while to enter into
the subject, except for five lines, no more than five lines, in
the short profession of faith which it issued. "I recognize that
the Catholic and Apostolic church at Rome is the mother and
mistress of all churches, and I promise and swear obedience
to the Roman bishop, the successor of blessed Peter (Chief
of theAposdes) and Vicar of Jesus Christ." That was all that
was said ; that was all that needed to be said. Protestants often
talk as if the Church of Rome dated from the Council of
Trent; as if the real breach in continuity between the
primitive Church and the modern Roman Church happened
just there. And yet the doctrine ofthe Pope's primacy, which
is the real issue between us and them, wasn't discussed at the
Council; it was simply pushed away into a corner as some-
thing no reasonable man would dream of disputing. In other
words, it was there already.

Another curious point is this you would naturally have

129

130 In Soft Garments

imagined that after all the upheaval of the sixteenth century,
when Europe as a whole had had to make up its mind
whether it would remain Catholic or turn Protestant, there
could be no more fuss and no more question over the position
of the Roman Pontiff. You would have thought that diffi-
culty settled once for all. Yet, as a matter of fact, one of the
bitterest attacks ever made on the position of the Pope
though it is true it only attacked certain of his privileges and
attacked them in a limited sort of way happened between
the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century and the Council
of the Vatican in the nineteenth century ; in fact you may say
that its influence was at work in a more or less degree all
through that period. This attack was the movement or theo-
logical tendency, perhaps it is best to call it a tendency, known
as Gallicanism.

Fundamentally, Gallicanism was a difference of opinion
between France and the rest of Catholic Europe as to certain
" liberties" claimed by die French Church as a local Church.
The liberties were not really liberties at all, they were the
claims of an absolute monarch to interfere in Church affairs,
particularly in the matter of appointing to vacant sees, and in
the still more lucrative matter of appropriating the revenues
of the sees while they were vacant. During the latter half of
the seventeenth century, in the great period of Louis XIV,
relations between Catholics in France and the Holy See were
very much what relations between Catholics in England and
the Holy See had been in the great days of Henry VIII,
between 1530 and 1550. It really looked as if Louis was not
content with saying Uetat, cest moi, and wanted to be able to
say L'eglise, cest moi as well. Humanly speaking, you might
have anticipated that the history of sixteenth-century England
might have repeated itself in seventeenth-century France, if
Louis XIV had happened to want a divorce. Fortunately he
didn't, he wasn't much interested in that sort of thing. And

The Key Man 131

by the end of the seventeenth century GalHcanism as a poli-
tical danger had come to an end. But it remained as a ten-
dency, and a very formidable tendency, right up to the rime
of the French Revolution and beyond it.

You see, GalHcanism didn't stop short at claiming certain
liberties for the Church in France. It had, at least in its extreme
form, an attitude of its own about the relation between the
authority of Popes and the authority of general councils. It
deliberately reaffirmed the decrees promulgated at the Coun-
cil of Constance, but never accepted by the Church, which
asserted that a general council has an authority superior to
that of die Pope. All through history absolute monarchs have
been fond of general councils. It is very difficult for an abso-
lute monarch to get hold of the Pope and make him say
what he wants him to say; it is not very difficult for him, if
his territories are sufficiently wide, to collect an assemblage of
carefully chosen bishops and make them say what he wants
them to say. That was how Arianism so long survived its
condemnation at Nicea. That was really how the Eastern
dioceses grew away from, and finally split away from, their
Catholic unity with the Church of the West. Louis XIV
believed in absolute monarchy, and consequently he believed
in general councils. And the general effect of GalHcanism was
to spread, in those countries which came under French
influence, the topsy-turvy and quite unworkable notion that
the Pope's decrees, whatever their solemnity, are not irre-
formable, and consequently cannot be regarded as infalHble,
until they have been ratified by the consent of the Church
normally, that is, by the vote of a general council.

You might have thought that all this questioning of the
papal prerogative would have found no echo in England,
where for a century and more martyrs had bled in defence of
the papacy. But as a matter of fact we EngHsh CathoHcs are
intimately concerned with the history of GalHcanism. You

132 In Soft Garments

must remember that from the rime of James II onwards
whatever political hopes Catholics could have were centred in
France. You must remember that most of our clergy had been
trained in France, and that the books of piety we used were
largely imported from France. And the result was that when a
Committee of Catholic gentlemen, in the year 1879, drew up
a Protestation on behalf of the English Catholics stating what
they really believed, and later a form of oath which they
were prepared to accept as the condition of being emanci-
pated from their civil disabilities, that protestation and that
oath contained the extraordinary words, "We acknowledge
no infallibility in the Pope."

That fact is sure to be quoted against us next year, when we
celebrate the centenary of our complete emancipation, which,
of course, followed some time later. We shall be reminded,
as Mr Gladstone reminded us at the time of the Vatican
Council, that we really obtained emancipation under false
pretences, by declaring our readiness to disown a doctrine
which has subsequently become a defined doctrine of the
Church, It is important, then, to examine the circumstances
of the time a little. In the first place, the four bishops who
then acted as Vicars Apostolic in England only consented to
sign the protestation when it was explained to them that the
whole paragraph was only meant to apply to the Pope's inter-
ference in temporal matters, and did not limit his authority in
things ecclesiastical ; that this had been the undoubted inten-
tion of those by whom the protestation was drawn up. In the
second place, it is to be remembered that the oath was not
signed by the bishops, and indeed was twice condemned by
the bishops, though. their grounds for doing so were never
fully made clear. And in the third place, the oath was never
actually taken. Providence interfered, through the rather
unlikely agency of the Anglican Bishop of St David's, and the
emancipation granted in 1791 was secured to Catholics on

The Key Man 133

condition of their taking a quite unobjectionable oath, similar
to that which had akeady been employed for the same pur-
pose in Ireland.

With all that, I think you can't deny that our ancestors
and I may say that some of your ancestors were badly mixed
up in it were sailing very close to the wind. They weren't
guilty of formal heresy, but they did propose to correct the
faith of eighteen centuries to suit the policy of a coterie of
squires gathered in a coffee-house. If the counsels of the Com-
mittee had prevailed, we English Catholics should certainly
have looked very foolish after the findings of the Vatican
Council in 1870.

That Council was not convened to discuss the subject of
infallibility. It was convened to discuss questions arising out
of the new attitude of Liberalism, in politics and in thought,
with which the world seemed to have become permeated
since the French Revolution. The discussion of infallibility
was introduced into the agenda as the result of representations
made by various bishops in different parts of the world for
example, the Archbishop of Baltimore. It was almost inevit-
able that the question should arise. On the one hand, the
Gallican influence was not yet dead. On the other hand, a new
and active school of ultramontanes had come into existence,
represented by Veuillot in the Univers and "W. G. Ward in
the Dublin Review. Reacting from GaUicanism, these writers
appeared determined to exaggerate the privileges of the
papacy at the expense of bishops and of councils ; they wanted
even the casual utterances of the Holy Father to be invested
with infallibility, and Ward, it is weE known, said he would
like to have an infallible definition served up every morning
with his breakfast. These two schools were growing so
violently apart that it would have been impossible to
summon an ecumenical council without canvassing their
differences.

134 In Soft Garments

The question raised at the Council was not whether the
Pope was infallible, everybody admitted that; but, first,
whether the moment was opportune for deciding the matter
hence the opposition were called "inopportunists" and,
second, what were the attendant conditions which made a
papal decree recognizably infallible. In the event, the Cisal-
pine party was defeated in the sense that a decree ivas passed
by the Council. It w r as passed by 433 votes to 2 ; though by
that time a good many bishops had withdrawn, some by way
of protesting that the decree was inopportune, some for the
more practical reason that France was just going to war with
Germany. In any case, it was a clear majority of the bishops
who attended the Council from first to last roughly four in
seven. On the other hand, the wording in which the decree
was drafted may more reasonably be considered a defeat for
the ultramontanes, since it refuses to extend the limits of
infallibility precisely where the ultramontanes would have
wished to extend them.

The decree states that "when the Roman pontiff speaks ex
cathedra (that is, when he decides, in the exercise of his office
as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, by virtue of his
supreme Apostolic authority, that a doctrine concerning faith
or morals is to be held by the entire Church), he possesses, in
consequence of the divine aid promised him in St Peter, that
infallibility with which the Divine Saviour wished his Church
to be endowed, for the definition of doctrine concerning faith
or morals ; and that such definitions of the Roman pontiffare
of themselves, and not in consequence of the Church's con-
sent, irreformable."

Now, it's true that that last phrase deals Gallicanism its
death blow. It gets rid for ever of the quite unworkable idea
that the authority of the Pope depends on the authority of the
Council. There is no way of deciding which councils were
ecumenical councils except by saying diat those councils were

The Key Man 135

ecumenical which had their decisions ratified by the Pope.
Now, either that ratification is infallible of itself, or else you
will immediately have to summon a fresh ecumenical council
to find out whether the Pope's ratification was infallible or
not, and so on ad infinitum. You can't keep on going round
and round in a vicious circle ; in the long run the last word of
decision must lie with one man, and that man is obviously the
Pope. In the last resort the Pope must be the umpire, must
have the casting vote. If therefore there is to be any infalli-
bility in the Church, that infallibility must reside in the Pope,
even when he speaks in his own name, without summoning a
council to fortify his decision.. So far, the definition was a
triumph, if you will, for the ultramontanes. But all the rest of
the language in which the decree is couched is very careful
language, clearly designed to show that the Pope is not always
infallible, but only in certain special conditions and those
conditions so elaborately expressed, that there can be no
doubt of the Council's general intention to limit the sphere of
infallibility.

Gallicanism is dead; it has, by a curious process of history,
committed suicide. Its argument was that whereas the Pope
is fallible a general council is infallible. Now, there is no
question that the Vatican Council was a general council,
from the point of view of the Catholic Church ; its decrees
were fully accepted by all those bishops who did not actually
sign them, without a single dissentient. Therefore the Vatican
Council is infallible, and when it says that the Pope is
infallible, that statement is infallibly true. If, then, GalHcan-
like, you believe in the infallibility of general councils, you
have to believe in the infallibility of the Pope as well. That
situation was admirably summed up by the Bishop of Little
Rock, an American bishop who had been one of the two
dissentients at the Council. "Holy Father," he said, "now I
believe." He had to ; we all have to. You may be a Catholic

136 In Soft Garments

now, or you may be an Anglican, but you cannot be a Galil-
ean any more.

There have been great men, and good men, and honest
men, all through the history of the Church who have felt
scruples about the exercise of the papal prerogative and the
direction in which it was tending, from St Cyprian down to
Cardinal Newman. But in every age the general sense of the
faithful has resisted any suspicion of an attempt to democra-
tize the constitution of the Church in defiance of our Lord's
promises. As you all know, at the final sitting of the Vatican
Council, when the infallibility question was decided, a terrific
thunderstorm broke over Rome. And the Council was itself
a thunderstorm ; it cleared the air. The Church has had plenty
of troubles to meet since 1870, and plenty of difficulties to
solve ; but the old dispute between Cisalpines and Ultramon-
tanes, which so tragically separated Veuillot and Dupanloup,
Ward and Newman, has passed into the region of forgotten
controversies. And, the rock of Peter stands unshaken, only
with a fresh definition as a fresh high-water mark to show
where the last flood reached.

XVI
VERBUM CARO FACTUM EST

fUR Lord Jesus Christ was both. God and Man.
As you all know, the formula in which
Catholic theology enshrines that notion,
the polish which Catholic theology gives
to that rough jewel of truth, is the formula
of the Hypostatic Union. We all learned to repeat those
words before we had the foggiest notion what they meant ;
they tripped so easily off our tongues that the first word got
shortened down into haipstatic, and perhaps became vaguely
connected in our minds with the meaningless sort of shout
we used to hear on the parade ground. However, we know a
little more about it now; at least I hope we do. The doctrine
of the hypostatic union is that in the historical figure of Jesus
of Nazareth we have to distinguish two natures, a human
and a divine Nature; but that those two natures belong to
a single Person, and that Person is wholly divine.

Well, you say, when we Ve got as far as that we haven't
really got much further. After all, what do we know about
what is meant by the word Nature, or what is meant by the
word Person? Aren't we defining something which is obscure
by something more obscure still, and isn't that a fallacy of
elementary logic ? Well, of course, there is a certain amount
of truth in that criticism. Our minds can't folly grasp the
meaning of obscure notions like nature and person even when
we are dealing with ordinary human subjects of study ; much

137

138 In Soft Garments

less then, wlien we are talking about God, to whose Being our
human language only implies imperfectly. But at the same
time, we are not to suppose that the Fathers of the Church
taught us to talk about nature and person merely so as to
plunge us into a condition of pious confusion ; like the old
Protestant lady in the story, who said what a lot of comfort
she got out of that blessed word Mesopotamia. No, theo-
logical language is meant to make the mysteries of our
religion not more obscure than they were, but on the con-
trary a little more precise, and a little more accurately defined
than they w r ere. It is designed, not exactly to make the thing
easier to believe, but to make it easier to know what exactly
we are called upon to believe in.

And in order to understand that language, much the
simplest recipe is to make a little excursion into Church
history, and see what heresies it was or rather, what errors
it was, for an error does not become a heresy until it is con-
trary to defined truth that these definitions were meant to
warn us against. One hears that tramps have a special sign
which they chalk up on the walls of a house which means,
"No good trying here ; you won't get anything out of that."
I always wish I knew what it was, because one could buy a
piece of chalk and save oneself a deal of trouble. In the same
sort of way, the Church, who has centuries of experience
behind her, chalks up, as it were, on certain lines of theo-
logical explanation, "No good trying here, you won't get
anything out of that." And the negative warnings which she
gives us when she anathematizes errors can be stated, if you
will, as positive warnings instead, and it is these positive
warnings which you will find expressed in her creeds.

God is one, God is three that is all the early Church knew
about the doctrine of the Trinity, and all it needed to know.
It was only when people started trying to be clever and to
explain the doctrine of the Trinity by formulae which -really

Verbum Carofactum est 139

had the effect of explaining away die doctrine of the Trinity,
that closer definition became necessary. Somebody, for ex-
ample, would try to make the doctrine a little easier for
people outside to understand by explaining that when you
talked about God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy
Ghost, you were simply talking about the same Divine
Person under three different aspects, looking at him from
three different points of view. And then the Catholic bishops
would ask themselves, "Does that really express the doctrine
which was handed down to me by my predecessors, and to
them by the holy apostles?" And the moment they asked
themselves that question, the reply was obvious, "No, I'm
hanged if it does." So they had to get together and hammer
out a formula which would make it clear that, whatever the
doctrine of the Trinity meant, it certainly meant something
different from that, a something more important than that,
something more mysterious than that. And so they insisted
that, although the Godhead is a single thing, the distinction
between the Father, the Son, and die Holy Ghost is a real
distinction between persons, not a mere distinction of
thought between three different aspects of the same thing.
Or again, right up to the later part of the Dark Ages the
Church was content to say, when she was called upon to
express ner Eucharistic doctrine, that the bread and wine
became, in the Mass, the Body and Blood of Christ. It was
only eight centuries or so after Christ that the controversies
began which had to be settled, in the end, by defining the
doctrine of Transubstantiation. And the language about
substance and accidents which is now so familiar to us
had to be applied to the problem in order that the incom-
plete, insincere explanations of Eucharistic doctrine which
had then been invented might be seen to be incomplete and
insincere. So with the Infallibility of the Pope ; Catholics
had simply been content to believe that the charisma of

140 In Soft Garments

infallibility was vested in the see which had been founded
by Peter, without enquiring any more closely what were the
conditions of its exercise. It wasn't till after the Counter-
Reformation, when the Gallicans produced their half-hearted
explanations of what it meant, that it became necessary to
define the doctrine in terms which would make such error
impossible in future ; and that, as we know, was done as late
as the year 1870.

And so it is with this doctrine of our Lord's Incarnation.
That he was believed from the very earliest times to be both
God and Man is the only possible explanation of the language
which the Church, from the very earliest times, has used
about him. But it wasn't till more than three centuries after
his death that it became necessary to speculate in what sense
he could be both God and Man at the same time. And that
was because people began to produce explanations of the
mystery which, consciously or unconsciously, were dishonest
explanations. They got rid of the mystery by exaggerating
the doctrine in one direction or the other ; either by treating
our Lord as God in a way which meant that he was not really
Man, or by treating him as Man in a way which meant that
he was not really God.

On the one side, you could talk and write as if his Manhood
had been altogether swallowed up in his Godhead. The
extremest form which that kind of speculation took was the
form known as Docetism ; the notion that he was God all the
time and merely took on the appearance of a Man. There was a
difficulty, to be sure; if he was not really Man, how did he
come to die on the Cross? The Docetists were reduced,
apparently, to the supposition that at the last moment he
simply withdrew from the earth, and allowed some man I
think they even suggested that it was Simon of Cyrene to be
crucified in his stead. That sort of theology was evidently too
fantastic to catch on much. But, short of that, you might hold

Verbum Caw factum est 141

that our Lord in becoming Incarnate took upon him a true
human Body, so that he was able to suffer and to die, but not a
complete human Nature, in the sense of having human feel-
ings, a human intellect, a human will. The second Person of
the Blessed Trinity, in the totality of his spiritual Nature,
simply replaced, in the Man Jesus Christ, all the spiritual part
of man ; that gave you a nice simple explanation of the whole
story, though to be sure it was difficult to see how God Incar-
nate in this sense could be said to grow in wisdom and know-
ledge ; or how our Lord could pray in Gethsemane that God's
Will might be done, not his, when in fact on the hypothesis
we are considering he had no will which was not Divine.
From this explanation, anyhow, the whole instincts of Catho-
lic orthodoxy recoiled. The Incarnate, so interpreted, might
have a human Body, but not a true human Nature. "No,"
said the Church, "there are two Natures in Christ, not one,"
On the other side, with Nestorius, you could so over-
emphasize our Lord's sacred Humanity as to make it appear
that he was not in the true sense God, but only a Man indwelt
by the Presence of God to a 'unique degree and perhaps in a
unique manner. You could speak as if the Child which was
bom of our Blessed Lady was just an ordinary human child
such as you and I were once ; the Nestorians* as you probably
know, would not refer to our Lady as the Mother of God, for
that reason ; and the title of Theo tokos became, at the time of
the Nestorian controversy, a kind of touchstone of ortho-
dox}?-. At some time in his life, perhaps even as late as his
Baptism, when the cloud was seen overshadowing him, the
second Person of the Blessed Trinity came down and dwelt in
this Man Christ Jesus, uniting himself to the Man Jesus Christ,
by a union closer, of course, than any union which has ever
been experienced by the greatest of his saints. And this ex-
planation, too, the Church rejects as unsatisfactory, ."No,"
she says, "that's not the primitive meaning of the language

142 In Soft Garments

used in the very earliest Christian documents about the Incar-
nation. If it were anything so comparatively simple as all
that, why should anybody have bothered to make it more
complicated? The very plausibility of your theory shows that
it's wrong that it's a modern variant, an attempt to explain
the thing away. If the baby who lay in the manger at Bethle-
hem was not, then and there, Almighty God, then that baby
was a human person. And the second Person of the Blessed
Trinity is also a Person ; so that in your Incarnation you have
to make use of a highly unphilosophic conception, that of two
Persons becoming literally one. No, there are two Natures in
the Incarnate, not just one ; but at the same time there is only
one Person in the Incarnate, not two."

The Christian mysteries transcend human thought. But
they do not contradict human thought ; they cut across our
experience just at those points where it is impossible to say
"This or that is impossible" because human thought, even in
interpreting ordinary human experience, finds in it, at those
points, an insoluble mystery. The Christian mysteries grow,
as it were, out of the chinks in our armour of thought, just as
a flower will grow, not out of a wall but out of a chink in the
wall. Take the mystery of Transubstantiation. Impossible,
you say, that the substance of a thing should be changed into a
different substance while the accidents remain unaltered. No,
you have no right to say that that is impossible ; because the
whole relation between substance and accidents is itself a kind
of natural mystery; it is a thing which eludes our thought.
Think of an orange ; it is of a yellow colour, more or less
round in shape, about two and half inches across, has a
particular, well-defined smell, often met with in railway
carriages. Yes, but what is the orange? Are we to think of it
as a kind of hatstand on which this yellowness, this round-
ness, these two and half inches of diameter, this pungent
smell, are hung up like so many hats ? You are up against the

Verbum Carofactum est 143

whole puzzle of the relation of universals to particulars, which
people have wrangled about for more than twenty centuries,
and still haven't arrived at a unanimous conclusion. It is just
there, just where "the wheeling systems darken, and our
benumbed conceiving soars" that a Voice comes in from the
other world and says "This is my Body."

Or again, take the mystery of grace and free will. How,
you ask, can one and the same action at one and the same time
be God's action and mine? It's impossible. But no, you see;
once again we have come across one of these chinks, as I call
them, in the armour of human thought. It is true that the
relation of grace to free will is a mystery ; but then, free will
itself is a mystery, which defies all explanation, and when you
think you have come across an explanation of it you find that,
after all, you have left the facts out of account. Take a merely
frivolous case in which, to all appearances at least, the faculty
of human choice is exercised. You want to buy a new tie, and
you have to choose between a green tie and a brown one.
What happens when you choose ? Are the attractions of the
brown tie so irresistible that they compel you to buy it
instead of the other? If so, it is not you who have chosen the
brown tie, it is the brown tie that has chosen you. Or do you
make up your mind as between the green tie and the brown
tie independently of the attractions or the suitability of either ?
In that case you have not chosen, you have merely tossed up,
so to speak, in your mind, and it is chance, not you, that has
selected the brown one. In every act of choice there is a
mystery staring you in the face the mystery of that process
by which your will identifies itself with a motive. And it's
just at that point, where our thought inevitably flounders in
any case, that the Divine action comes into our lives ; it is God
that gives us both to think and to do of his good pleasure.

And it's the same with this mystery of the hypostatic union.
It's all nonsense, you complain, to talk about "person" and

144 In Soft Garments

"nature" as if they were two quite separate things ; as if you
could stick a nature on to a person just as you stick a postage
stamp on to an envelope. That is crude, mediaeval psychology ;
we know more about that sort of thing nowadays. Yes, but
if you come right down to it, what do we know about that
sort of thing nowadays ? When you turn your thought in-
wards, and think about yourself, who is thinking about
whom, or what is thinking about what? You are not simply
thinking about your thought about yourself; because that
would mean that you were thinking about your thought
about your thought about your thought about yourself and
so on ad infinitum. No, the term of your thought is you, the
person who is thinking. And in doing so, you have already
divided yourself up, in a sense, into two ; the intellectual
nature which is thinking, and the person, somehow mysteri-
ously connected with that intellectual nature, who is being
thought about. No, we don't really know anything about the
relations between a person and a nature; we've come up
against yet another of those gaps in our thought, where the
soil of natural mystery gives room for the flower of super-
natural mystery to blossom. When our Lord thought about
himself, the intellectual nature which thought was human ;
the Person who was being thought about was not human, but
divine. That is mystery, if you like ; but it is mystery in clear-
cut terms.

And don't forget the difference between natural mystery
and supernatural mystery. When we come up against a
natural mystery, it's an uncomfortable sort of experience ; we
feel inclined to apologize for it, to be ashamed of it. Here is
the whole world around me full of accidents and of sub-
stances, full, that is, of sense-impressions which I can't deny,
and which can't nevertheless be the whole of reality, and I
can't for the life of me find out what the relation between a
substance and its accidents is ! Here am I continually making

Verbum Carofactum est 145

choices, moral choices or choices of convenience, and I can't
even determine the relation between my will and the motives
which influence it ; here am I dignified, as a human being,
with the power of self-conscious thought, and yet whenever
I think about myself I'm hanged if I know what it is I'm
thinking about. It's a perpetual irritation to an intellectual
creature to be comiiig up against blank walls all the time ; and
that's why philosophers always look worried. But with a
supernatural mystery, which comes in at just these same points
and makes them more mysterious than ever, we are not
meant to feel ashamed of ourselves ; we are not meant to
apologize. No, we say, " Hullo, another mystery! Splendid!
That's fine! Now the supernatural is really getting to work,
the two sides of the mystery, the positive and negative poles
as it were, effecting a discharge. That's all right ; that is what
we were expecting ! "

You see, these people who produce ingenious explanations
by way of making the Christian mysteries easier for our
thought, only do it at the expense of spoiling the story. The
Christian faith derives its interest, after all, from two decisive
moments in our Lord's life Bethlehem and Calvary. Con-
sider how poor a story you make of Bethlehem if you believe,
with the Nestorian, that there were two Persons in the Incar-
nation, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity and the
person of a man Jesus Christ. In that case, the child in the
manger is simply an ordinary human child who is destined,
one day, to be mysteriously overshadowed by the Presence of
God. But that's not the story ; the point of the story is that the
Child in the Manger was God. Or consider how poor a story
you make of Calvary if, with the Monophysite, you believe
that there was only one nature in the Incarnation, and that
nature divine. Oh, no doubt as long as our Lord had a human
Body the physical sufferings of Calvary were real. But the
mental sufferings, the disappointment, the disillusionment,

146 In Soft Garments

the fear, the grief over Judas' treachery and Peter's denial, the
offering, in Gethsemane, of the human will to the divine all
that goes, all that becomes unreal, unless you believe that our
Lord had a true human Nature which could be the seat of all
those emotions. Once again, that's not the story ; the story is
that while he who suffered was God, he suffered with all the
anguish, mental as well as physical, which belongs to the
nature of Man.

So don't let's think that when the Church teaches us the
doctrine of the hypostatic union she is merely using long
words for the sake of using long words, merely trying to con-
fuse us. It's not that at all; she is trying to safeguard, as accur-
ately as human language can safeguard, the essential truth of
the Incarnation ; she only wants to make us realize that when
she says God became Man she is not guilty of a metaphor or a
piece of pulpit rhetoric. God did really become Man ; was
Man, and lay in the manger, was Man, and hung on the Cross,
is Man, and has united with himself for ever that human
nature he took, humiliated on earth, scarred with the scars of
earth; reigns in it, eternally, in heaven.

XVII
ET HABITAVIT IN NOBIS

|HE Incarnation of our Lord is a mystery. And
wherever it deals with mystery, you will find
that Catholic theology is a middle way be-
tween two extremes. That is natural, because
a theological mystery always involves some-
thing which seems to our minds a contradiction; we are
expected to hold simultaneously two truths which are
apparently irreconcilable. And there is an obvious temptation
for the incomplete theologian, when he is up against that kind
of situation, to explain away one of those truths in the in-
terests of the other. It's like cheating at patience, one can see
in a moment that it is wrong, because it makes the thing too
simple. So here, in the mystery of the Incarnation. FrD'Arcy,
I expect, told you last Sunday about Nestorianisrn and those
more modern views, all tainted with Nestorianism, which
explain away the mystery of the Incarnation by explaining
away the statement that our Lord was God. This morning,
we have to deal with the opposite error ; with the ideas of the
Docetse, and Apollinarians, and Monophysites, and Monothe
lites, who tried to explain away the mystery of the Incarnation
by explaining away the statement that our Lord was Man.

If you are in the habit of arguing about theology with your
non-Catholic friends, you have probably discovered that
about 90 per cent, of them don't believe our Lord was God.
They say they do, lots of them; they think they do, but

147

148 In Soft Garments

they've got it all wrong ; they only mean that our Lord was a
Man morally united, in will and purpose, to God. And if you
succeed in persuading one of them that that is all wrong, that
our Lord was personally God, you will probably find that he
has fallen straight into the opposite pitfall. " Oh, you mean he
was really God disguised under the outward appearance of a
Man? Rather like Transubstantiation?" No, that won't do;
that's Docerism. "Oh, I see; then you mean that he had the
body of a man, but his soul was Divine?" No, that won't do
either ; that's Apollinarianisrn. "Then I suppose you mean our
Lord had a human Nature to start with, but when the Incar-
nation happened, the Divine Nature came and swamped it,
so to speak ; it wasn't recognizably human any longer?" No,
that's Monophysitism. The Christian doctrine of the Incarna-
tion is that a single Person, the second Person of the Blessed
Trinity, had, and has, two distinct natures at the same time.
The Person of the Divine Word, and the Person of the Man,
Jesus of Nazareth, are one and the same.

When we've said that, we've done something WVve made
it clear what the hypostatic union is not. You know how,
going up and down the river, you sometimes come across a
stone monument telling you where somebody or other was
drowned. It's nice that he should have a memorial ; it is also
a good thing that you should be told which parts of the river
are treacherous to bathe in. And the creeds are like diose
monuments ; when you've seen where Apolliiiaris fell in, and
where Nestorius fell in, and where Eutyches fell in, you don't,
unless you're a fool, go and make the same mistake. The
Church has put up signposts traffic-lights which you gate-
crash at your peril. You know what Catholic doctrine isn't.
But, on the positive side, when you've said that two Natures
were united under a single Person, you haven't made the
truth more luminous to your own mind. We don't know
what a Person is, and we don't know what a nature is. All you

Et haUtavit in nobis 149

can say, quite roughly, is that your nature is what you have,
and your person is what you are. When a burglar is arrested,
you sometimes read that so many bank notes were found on
his person. They weren't really, of course; they were found
in liis clothes ; and if you take offyour clothes, your person is
still there. And when your soul is separated from your body
at death, your person will still be there, in your soul. But your
sotd isn't a bare personality; it has a nature; has memory,
intellect, and will. If you lose your memory, you are still the
same person ; you can be sent to prison for an offence which
you committed before you lost your memory. Your person is
something underlying that memory, that intellect, that will ;
it is an idea so subtle that we can only reach it by abstraction.
Philosophy has to confess itself beaten when it is asked what it
means by the distinction between the person, what a man is,
and the nature, what a man has ; it's a mystery of our common
human thought. And out of that mystery grows the mystery
of the hypostatic union.

That being so, we must be careful how we think of our
Lord in his Incarnate state. We must remember that the
nature he took upon himself at the Incarnation was human,
not divine. And, therefore, when a person says, "I can't
understand how our Lord, if he was God, could be tempted in
the wilderness, or agonize in the Garden, or feel dereliction on
the Cross, or how he grew in wisdom and knowledge/' he is
stating the problem wrongly. There is a problem, but he is
stating it wrongly. We don't know enough about the rela-
tions between person and nature to be able to say how much
and in what manner the divineness of our Lord would over-
flow, so to speak, into his human experience. It was his human
nature that was tempted, and agonized ; it was as Man, not as
God, that he learnt his alphabet. You've no apparatus, here,
for deciding that such and such an experience was impossible
to him.

150 In Soft Garments

But, as I say, there is a problem. Because It is the tradition
of Catholic theology that our Lord, even as Man, possessed all
the highest qualities of which a human nature is capable,
where those qualities would not be inconsistent with the pur-
pose which the Incarnation had in view. Thus, they teach
that our Lord was not subject to disease, because disease is an
imperfection ; but at the same time he was capable of suffering
of thirst, for example, or weariness because suffering was
an essential part of his mission on earth. Human nature, after
all, is made in the image of God ; and our Lord, even as Man,
was God-like as far as it is possible for man to be so ; except
where that would be inconsistent with his mission, with the
character of that suffering Servant who came to redeem man
by his obedience, and his exposure to misfortune. And that
involves some important and at first sight disconcerting
consequences.

Let's look at it in this way. There are three perfections in
God which it is easy for us to recognize, if only because they
contrast so glaringly with our own imperfections. Christ as
God is all-powerful, is all-wise, is all-good. Was Christ as
Man all-powerful, all-wise, all-good? If not, what limitations
were imposed on him, and on what principle ?

Was Christ as Man all-powerful, in the sense that his
physical powers knew no limits, that his endurance was
inexhaustible, his muscular strength unlimited? Clearly not.
Such qualities do not contribute to the perfection of human
nature ; we have no reason to think they existed in Adam, for
instance. And if they had existed in our Lord, then he could
not have been hungry or thirsty or tired, as he evidently was.
I think it is consoling to reflect that this would apply not only
to his purely physical strength, but to his nervous resources as
well. When you think of the life which he led on earth, do
not think only of his bodily fatigue, think of the nervous
strain it must have been all those multitudes flocking round

Et habitavit in noUs 151

him, how tired we get of crowds! All those stupid questions
he was asked how tired we get of stupid questions! The
shortness of the career which he allowed himself, three years,
less than three years really, to convert a world how exhaust-
ing it is, working always against time! In all this he would
share our disabilities; he would hallow, beforehand, our
worst experiences. And in Gethsemane he reached, and
allowed us to see his reaching, the extremity of nervous
humiliation. There was a sense, you see, in which our Lord
was actually afraid of death. You may know the story of a
Spanish general who showed nervousness on the eve of
battle, and was asked, " Surely, General, you are not afraid?"
To which his answer was, "Sir, my body is afraid of the
dangers into which my spirit is going to lead it." That is,
partly, the meaning of our Lord's agony. His body was afraid
of the dangers into which his spirit was going to lead it.

But, you see, there is a different sense in which we might
ask whether our Lord, as Man, was all-powerful. Had he
control, if he would, over the forces of nature, so that he
could bend them to his will? And the answer to that, I sup-
pose, is that he could not do that, precisely as Man; but, all
the time he was Man, he was also God. Such authority over
the winds and the sea, over disease and death, belonged to his
Person rather than to his Nature ; and his Person was Divine.
Jesus of Nazareth, therefore, performed miracles in virtue of
his own dignity ; and his human nature was an instrument in
performing them. And here, I think, you may observe two
indications of our Lord's condescension, his courtesy. In the
first place, although his Godhead has always the right to
command, he prefers to show us his Humanity at prayer. Just
before that tremendous moment when he stood outside the
tomb and cried, "Lazarus, come forth!" he said what?
"Father, I give thee thanks that thou hast heard me." He
would sooner we thought of him as the instrumental cause

6

152 In Soft Garments

through which God does miracles than as the agent who does
miracles himself. That ought to teach us, oughtn't it, to throw
ourselves into the background rather more than we do ? And
there's a second point about our Lord's use of his superhuman
powers whether as acting in his own name, or as the instru-
ment of God's mercies, he will only use those powers on
special occasions, and for special purposes. He will not, at his
temptation, turn the stones into bread ; he will wait till he
can get food in the ordinary way. He will ask the Samaritan
woman to draw water for him. He will cross the Sea of Gali-
lee, ordinarily, on ship-board, though we know that he could
walk on the water if he liked. The reason of that, I suppose, is
that he wanted to be indebted to his creatures. As a child, he
would be suckled at his Mother's breast, dying, he would
accept a draught of wine from his executioner. From that,
too, we have something to learn ; we have to learn to accept
kindness and help from one another, not to refuse it, as we so
often do, out of pride. The disciple is not above his Master;
if he was not ashamed to be indebted to his fellow-men, how
should we?

So much for the powers of the Incarnate ; now for his
knowledge; how much did he know, as Man? The theo-
logians teach that he enjoyed, as Man, the beatific vision
which is granted to the saints in heaven, since this is evidently
not beyond the compass of a perfect humanity. He was simul
comprehensor et viator. I haven't time to go into it; but if you
think for a moment of the Gospel record, you'll be struck by
the way in which he is always represented as having strange
insight into what was happening at the moment, clear pre-
vision of what was to happen in the future. Constantly he
reads the thought in other people's minds. He prophesies, not
once but several times over, the fact of his Passion and the
manner of it ; his betrayal, his desertion by the aposdes, his
Resurrection. And when he does ask a question, I think you

Et habitavit in nobis 153

can say that It is nearly always the sort of question a teacher
asks, not because he wants to know but because he wants to
draw the other person out. "Whose image is there on this
coin?" "What did Moses command you?" "Who do men
say that I am?" as if he had no way of finding out things
like that for himself!

But, of course, all that creates a difficulty. If he knew so
much that is hidden from the ordinary human being, in the
present or in the past, how could he have a real human
experience ? And how can it be true to say that he increased
in wisdom and knowledge? It is easy to possess powers with-
out using them; can one possess knowledge, and not use it?
Well, it is universally agreed that our Lord did have experi-
mental knowledge as well ; he did learn things. How he com-
bined these two different avenues of experience, I don't
think we can really guess. It's a mystery to us, because we
have never had the beatific vision. But it might look quite
simple, if we knew more about the beatific vision. If you
possessed, at this moment, all the knowledge which it is
possible for man to have, it would not all be equally present
to your mind at this moment. Some act of attention, of
focusing, would be necessary before you got at the piece of
knowledge you wanted, at any given time, to use. So it may
be that there is not really so much difficulty as we think about
the idea of our Lord at Nazareth learning things which he
knew already, if they were somehow in the background of
his mind when he learnt them.

At the same time, we have to recognize that our Lord's
privileged position in this respect made him different from us
others. He could not, if you come to think of it, exercise the
virtue of faith, strictly so called, because faith must have a
dim, not a clear view of its object; nor the virtue of hope,
strictly so called, because hope implies an uncertainty about
the future. But he could such a strange thing is our human

154 In Soft Garments

fashioning experience on the Cross such an obscuration of
his powers as made \mnjeel as if God had deserted him. That
is difficult, if you like, to understand, but I don't think we
ought to find it difficult to accept, because it is vouched for
by the people who ought to know, as far as anybody can
know, what such dereliction means the saints who have
written on mystical theology. He could not doubt ; he could
not despair ; but he reached, I suppose, if we may dare to
speculate on such a subject, that borderline of spiritual dark-
ness in which the reason itself, with whatever of certitude it
possesses, becomes like a beleaguered citadel with the enemy
battering at its gates.

And that brings me on to the last part of our subject. God
is all-holy; and it is evident that Christ as Man reflected that
holiness in a unique degree. Only, are we to think of that
holiness in him as a peaceful, undisturbed possession which
could feel no shock of assault from without? Or are we to
think of it as maintained by an effort, in the face of difficul-
ties? What freedom of choice did our Lord enjoy? Would it
have been possible for him to commit sin?

The answer to that question is a very simple one. Catholic
theology teaches that our Lord possessed a privilege even
higher than the privilege granted to our Lady. The privilege
conferred on her by her immaculate Conception was that of
posse non peccare, being able not to sin ; the curse of Eden was
revoked in her. But our Lord as Man had the still higher
privilege of non posse peccare, not being able to sin We catch
our breath for a moment when the archangel comes to our
Lady and tells her of her sublime destiny ; it was within her
power to say "No." But when our Lord is tempted in the
wilderness, as we shall read in next Sunday's gospel, it was
impossible that he should yield; we can have no doubt,
no abstract doubt even, of the issue. Why then, you ask,
what was the point of the temptation? And is our Lord's

Et habitavit in nobis 155

temptation really a very useful model for us, when it was
no real test, only a kind of demonstration?

Well, I don't want to steal next Sunday's gospel from next
Sunday's preacher. I'll only say this, that the temptation in
the wilderness is the story of an effort by the devil to find out
whether our Lord was just man or something more than
man ; it was a true test in that sense, although the devil got
nothing out of it. Our Lord, it must be admitted, did not
share the moral struggles we go through, because we have a
traitor within the citadel, our own corrupt nature ; he could
only know temptation as something external to himself.
But that does not mean his example is no use to us as a
model. Sinless, he fought sin with those same weapons which
he wanted us sinners to use; self-denial, prudence, and
humility.

I have been spending all my time, I am afraid, in pointing
out to you what our Lord's Incarnation doesn't mean. Let me
remind you, in conclusion, of what it does mean. It means
that God made Man has experienced cold, hunger, thirst,
fatigue, sleeplessness, bodily suffering of the most intense
kind ; that he has known the emotions of love, pity, indigna-
tion, joy, grief, and bodily fear ; that he has suffered from the
neighbourhood of evil, and of the Prince of evil himself; that
he has allowed himself to descend into the depths of spiritual
desolation; that he has worked, and watched, and prayed,
and lived the life of common men, and accepted benefits from
them, and consolation in sadness. It is such a Master we serve ;
one who shares with us the experience of everything in our
nature, except what is degrading to it, of every accident in our
fortunes except what results, immediately, from sin. In the
bond of that common experience he offers us a human friend-
ship ; a friendship which survives neglect and coldness on our
part, which follows every movement of ours with anxious
solicitude, and does not end with death.

XVIII
IMMORTALITY

\T is a tiling we should always be careful about
when we enter into any discussion, especially
with non-Catholics, about our religious
beliefs, to distinguish between the knowledge
^r^^c, wl 1 ^ niere reason would give us, even apart
from revelation, and the knowledge about which we should
have no certainty at aE if it had not been revealed to us. That
the soul is immortal is demonstrable by philosophy ; you can
see that from the existence of pagan treatises on the subject,
like the Phcedo of Plato. That is not to say that it is a necessary
part of every Catholic's beliefs to be able to prove it or even
to follow the proofs of it. They do not make themselves evi-
dent to all minds ; and some minds are less ready than others
to enter into metaphysical considerations. You are perfectly
within your rights, therefore, if you say, "Personally I can't
keep up with all this abstruse reasoning, and I believe that my
soul is immortal because the Church, depending upon a reve-
lation from God himself, tells me that it is." But at the same
time you ought to know that there is a philosophical method
of argument by which this truth can be established ; otherwise
it will bother you to feel that many of your non-Catholic
friends, who do not admit the claims of revelation, have no
means of reaching a certainty which is, obviously, of such
importance for the regulation of our everyday lives.
But when we get beyond that, when we discuss doctrines

156

Immortality 157

like those of heaven, hell, and purgatory, then we have to take
revelation for our guide, because our human reason does not
enable us to reach any certainty here. We could make guesses,
of course ; these notions are not merely Christian notions, and
you will find them worked out with great elaborateness by
some of the heathen writers ; in Plato's Republic, for example,
or in the sixth book of the dEneid ; and the necessity of a system
of rewards and punishments beyond the grave seemed evident
to so critical a mind as that of Immanuel Kant. But we should
only be guessing, really, if revealed theology did not come to
our aid. Now, what I want to do this morning is to bridge the
gap a little between immortality as it is viewed from the
standpoint of natural theology, and what the Church tells us
about a future life. Do we know anything this is what I
want to ask about what our immortality is or is not like, by
our natural reason? Or do we merely know that immortality
is a fact, without understanding anything about its nature?
For we shall hear our non-Catholic friends discussing immor-
tality, and we shall hear them arriving at all sorts of strange
conclusions ; can we tell them anything about the conclusions
which they ought to arrive at ?

First let us notice this; that immortality, even philoso-
phically considered, necessarily means personal immortality.
You will sometimes find people nowadays who accept, quite
cheerfully and with conviction, the idea that life survives
beyond the grave, and yet, when you question them, will take
the gilt off the gingerbread entirely by explaining that they
do not mean personal immortality after all. The soul is not
snuffed out like a candle at death, no ; but it is absorbed, they
will tell you, into a kind of reservoir of spirit, like a drop fall-
ing into the ocean. If you are religiously minded, you will say
that the soul after death becomes absorbed in God ; if you are
not religiously minded, you wilflay that it becomes absorbed
in a universal principle of life, whatever that may mean ; but

158 In Soft Garments

in either case its conscious identity will perish ; there will no
longer be a you, remembering its own past, enjoying its own
present experience, looking forward to the personal experi-
ence of an endless future. Death will not be annihilation, but
it will be, if we may use a quite vulgar illustration, something
like getting lost in the wash.

I think the reason why men's minds fall easily into such a
mistake is very largely this that in all languages the soul, or
the spirit, is apt to be described by a word borrowed from our
material experience which means breath, just that and nothing
more. You see, as there is nothing else like the soul in our
experience, nothing that we can possibly compare it with,
men were driven to describe it by a metaphor, and an
obviously inadequate metaphor. There is no reason in the
world why we should go about thinking of the soul as if it
were a kind of gas. Such a description gives us some faint idea
of its immateriality ; but no kind of clue as to its inner nature.
And I suggest that these people who talk as if the soul would
be absorbed after death are only, after all, going one better
than people like Sir Arthur Keith, who tells us that it will be
snuffed out like a candle. According to these people, it will
not be snuffed out like a candle, but will be turned off like a
jet of gas. They think of the human race as a vast collection of
gas-jets, which burn all right for a time until they run into a
motor-bus or something, and then are immediately turned
off. Well, of course, that does not mean annihilation. The gas
still exists when the tap is turned off, but it exists only as part
of a huge volume of gas, the greater part of which is stored up
in those enormous gasometers by the Ferry Hinksey back-
water. So the soul, they think, when it leaves the body is just
a kind of vapour, which forms part of a huge volume of
vapour that is floating about somewhere, we don't quite
know where.

Now, all that is assuming that what we know about the

Immortality 159

soul is derived from what we know about our fellow-men.
What we know about our fellow-man is that just before
the moment we call death he is capable of self-determined
movement, or apparently self-determined movement,
whereas after the moment which we call death he is just a
lump of matter which lies there inert. What is it that has gone
out of him? Nothing that we know of by our experience;
nothing, for all we can tell, more than what has gone out of a
fly when we crush it on the window-pane. But, if you come
to think of it, what we know about the soul is not derived
from what we observe in our fellow-men ; from what they
look like, whether before or after death, or from the way in
which they behave during life. Our experience of the soul
comes from inside; you are conscious, directly conscious, of
your own soul, not of anybody else's. When you think, you
are conscious of yourself as thinking ; you can become the
object of your own thought. And it is true to say that that
soul of yours is half of your experience. All your experiences
can be divided into two ; the thing which you experience, and
yourself as experiencing it. That soul of yours is something
known directly ; so that there is much more to be said for the
subjective idealist, who refuses to believe that anything exists
except his own soul, than for the materialist, who doubts the
existence of the soul altogether.

The soul, then, as it is given us in this lonely, individual
experience of conscious life what do we know about what it
is like? We know it as something individual, which does not
mix with anything else, which can hold no commerce with
anything else except through the medium of the body. How
extraordinary it is, when you come to diink of it, that I, when
I want to put my ideas before your minds, should have to
instruct all sorts of little cells in my brain to set all sorts of little
muscles going in my tongue and lips, these movements
setting up a series of vibrations in the air, which act upon

160 In Soft Garments

certain nerves in the drums of your ears, and so, by way of
the material brain, can convey impressions to your immortal
mind! But this is what is happening now; there is no short
cut to be reached between one soul and another. The soul,
then, is given to us in experience as a lonely, individual thing ;
it is also given to us in experience as an indivisible thing. You
can't imagine your soul being cut in half. You talk of it as
being divided up into intellect, will and memory ; but it isn't
really divided. Your will is you, the whole of you, willing ;
your intellect is you, the whole of you, thinking. There is no
such thing as half your soul. And if the soul is thus individual
and indivisible, it isn't like a gas-jet at all. If you cannot
imagine it as cut in half, equally you cannot think of two souls
as somehow merged into one. If each soul is a lonely point of
experience, you cannot imagine a whole multitude of souls
losing each its own consciousness and absorbed into a kind of
world-consciousness instead. This whole doctrine of souls
after death getting lost in the wash is false to everything we
know about the soul in our human experience.

Well, I mustn't delay longer over that ; I must pass on to
another doctrine which you will sometimes find defended by
the extraordinary loose thinking of our day. Not that it is a
new doctrine at all ; it is an extremely old doctrine, to which
the human mind is apt to return when religious certainties
grow weak. I mean the doctrine of metempsychosis, or the
transmigration of souls. You have all come across that theory
at school, when you read the classics ; the great exponent of it,
as you will remember, was Pythagoras, the philosopher who
found a shield hung up in a temple, which was reputed to
have belonged to Euphorbus, a warrior killed in the Trojan
war, and proceeded to claim the shield as his own because, as
he said, it had just occurred to him that he had been Euphor-
bus in a previous life. It would certainly be a very comfortable
doctrine for anybody who is fond of picking up antiques. His

Immortality 161

thought had a profound influence on the speculations of
antiquity, and you will find traces of it both in Plato and in
Virgil. And remember, the idea of reincarnation has this
attraction for the human mind, that it suggests a convenient
way in which the wrongs and unhappinesses of this world can
be redressed. Who knows if your fate in a future incarnation
may not be determined by the way in which you behave in
this present incarnation of yours? So that one soul can go on
passing from one life into another, now happy now unhappy
according as it has met or failed to meet its earHer opportuni-
ties, and that process continues ad infinitum ?

I don't know whether it is fanciful to suggest that ideas of
that sort are again encouraged, in these modern days, by an
inadequate metaphor taken from contemporary science, taken
this time not from gas but from electricity. After all, a single
unit of electricity may express itself in various different ways,
either pushing along the train you are sitting in, or lighting up
your room, or producing a nasty, inhuman sort of heat in one
of those electric stoves they give you nowadays instead of
fires. Why should not the soul be something like an electric
spark, which finds expression now in this way, now in that ;
at one time as a human being, let us say, and at another time
as a cow or a tadpole ? I don't know that there is any body of
responsible people who seriously assert that this is so, except
perhaps the theosophists. But you will find people speculating
whether it might not be so, and refusing to accept the Chris-
tian idea of eternity in consequence. Now, what are we going
to say to that kind of person?

I don't think you can say with truth that, in the light of
mere reason, such speculations are absolutely impossible. You
can say everything short of that ; you can say that they rest on
no shadow of proof, and moreover that they are extraordin-
arily improbable, because they are quite out of line with what
we do know about the soul. If, of course, people who believed

162 In Soft Garments

in them believed in them as part of a revelation, and were
prepared to give us credentials by which the truth of that
revelation could be recognized, we should stop to consider
them. But no such credentials are forthcoming ; nor is there
any proof of these assertions in themselves. Of course, people
will quote you Wordsworth's ode on the intimations of
immortality and tell you that you do now and again have
that odd experience of remembering something which, you
are sure, never happened in this life ; finding a landscape or a
scene familiar, for example, although you are quite certain
that you were never there before. But all that, you see, what-
ever be the explanation of it, is really the exception which
proves the rule. If their doctrine were true, we ought to be
remembering things all the time. Or at least we ought to
carry away considerable memories of a past life, instead of
these vague flashes which a psychologist will explain to you in
any number of different ways.

But, worse than being unproved, that doctrine is, as I say,
out of line with all we do know about the soul. You see, one
of the characteristic activities of the human soul is memory.
It is true that memory can be interrupted by physical in-
fluences, a fall off a horse, for example, which may make a
person forget a whole lot of things which have gone before it.
But such a loss of memory is never total; even if you forget
your own name you will remember that two and two make
four. And if, for example, you challenge me to prove that I
am the same person who was a fellow of Trinity in 1914, 1 do
so by appealing to the phenomenon of continuous memory.
Or if you challenge me, rather more fantastically, to prove
that you are not me, I shall say, "Tell me what intention I
said Mass for yesterday, and if you can remember that, then I
shall begin to consider the question whether you are me."
Now, this phenomenon of memory, linking up all our ex-
periences and dividing so sharply the total of my experience

Immortality 163

from the total of yours, has disappeared, it seems, when you
and I find ourselves reincarnated in a different life. What
confidence, then, are we to feel that some soul a hundred
years hence will be identical with yours or mine, when the
very hall-mark of conscious identity, namely memory, is
absent from it?

You can say, then, that these speculations are very improb-
able. But it is only when you take revelation into account that
you can be absolutely certain they are wrong. It remains to
men once to die, and after that the judgment ; that is the faith of the
Christian Church. And that faith has practical consequences,
of terrible importance. Your personality will not become lost
and merged after death ; it will live on, with all the liabilities
it contracted here. And on the other side it will not be living
a second human life like this, in which it will be able to
retrieve past mistakes and atone for past errors. This life is the
one chance given us of proving whether we want to be found
friends of God or not ; no argument of human philosophy
encourages us to think otherwise, and divine revelation
assures us that it is so.

There is one other point I would like to touch on, in which
Catholic theology differs from many loose speculations of
to-day. And here we have only revelation to guide us ; human
reasoning could have given us no light on the subject at all.
The point I mean is this ; that the attitude of the soul at the
moment of death has a decisive importance for eternity. If
you get into an argument about this, you will almost certainly
find that your non-Catholic friend has different ideas about it ;
he thinks, you will find, that after you are dead Almighty
God simply adds up in one list all the sins you have com-
mitted, and in another list all the good actions you have done,
strikes a kind of balance between the two, and pronounces
sentence accordingly. Now, I don't say that there is no truth
at all in such a notion ; I don't say it is probable, for example,

164 In Soft Garments

that God would allow a soul which has been really trying
faithfully to serve him for years upon years to fall away from
him at the very last. But we do know that a soul can be saved
by grace at the last moment of a mis-spent life ; that is certain
in die case of the Penitent Thief; and we may hope, please
God, that it has been true in countless other lives, even where
there was no external sign given of a death-bed contrition.
"Which clearly means that the moment of death is, as I say,
a moment of decisive importance; and that you and I ought
to pray for perseverance, and for the grace of a Christian
death, even when the event seems remote and our spiritual
state gives us no special cause for anxiety. Life doesn't just
depend upon being good and being bad ; God's grace is what
we want to pray for, and pray for all the more earnestly in
proportion as we are humble enough to realize that we cannot
do without it.

XIX
THE CHURCH AND HUMAN PROGRESS

|HE two parables of the Mustard Seed and the
Leaven are a pair, and are obviously meant to
be a pair. Our Lord seems to have been fond
of this method; partly, I suppose, on the
principle that if you give two illustrations of
a moral which you want to rub in, you can make sure of
people seeing the real point, instead of going off on side
issues ; any speaker will tell you that. Partly, perhaps, because
his audiences were mixed, and an illustration which would
appeal to one set of them would not appeal to others. There
were men there and women ; and so you find him asking,
"What man is there among you that hath a hundred sheep,
and if he lose one of them ..." and then, "Or what woman
is there having ten groats, if she lose one of them . . ." he
will suit his lesson to both classes. And so here ; the kingdom
of heaven is like a mustard seed which a man took and
planted in his field ; or again it is like to leaven which a
woman took and hid in three measures of meal. It is part of
our Lord's great courtesy, that he will make allowances for
everyone.

But at the same time you will find this about the parables
which our Lord gives us in pairs ; that the moral is not always
quite die same in either case ; the second will give it a slightly
different twist from the first. And so it is here. By the king-
dom of heaven our Lord customarily means, as I hope we all

165

1 66 In Soft Garments

know, not the future life which we shall enjoy in heaven, but
his Church on earth, which is the appointed means of con-
ducting us to it. If there was nothing else to assure us of that,
these two parables would be sufficient proof of it. Our Lord
did not occupy his whole rime, while he preached on earth,
in expounding a philosophy of unworldliness, of sincerity, of
forbearance, of loving our enemies, and so on. He came to
found a Church ; and he foresaw how that Church would
develop through the centuries, and has prophesied for us,
though it be only in rough outline, its development. And in
these two parables, evidently, he is telling us how his Church
is destined to grow. How small it looked, when he stood there
and preached to groups of peasants standing by the lake of
Galilee; or when, after his Ascension, a hundred and twenty
souls waited in the upper room for the coming of the Holy
Spirit just so the mustard seed is small; just so the bit of
leaven is insignificant in size compared with the three
measures of meal which are to be leavened by it. The influ-
ence of the Church grew secretly ; people who lived in those
early centuries didn't know what was happening, until they
suddenly found that communities of Christians had sprung
up in every corner of the empire ; so the growth of a tree, or
the working of leaven, is something hidden from us ; we can-
not stand by and watch it happening. The extension of his
Church was an irresistible force ; just so, given proper con-
ditions of soil, the seed must develop ; just so the leaven
inevitably corrupts the unleavened meal with which it
conies in contact. In all that, you see, the two parables are
alike.

But there are other aspects, and very important aspects in
which they differ. And in this above all; that the growth of
the mustard seed shows you the Christian Church as a body
which swells in size, whereas the spread of the leaven shows
you the Christian gospel as an influence which radiates force

The Church and Human Progress 167

and communicates it to its neighbourhood. The tree takes
something Jrom its surroundings; takes nourishment from
the earth and die moisture and the sunlight, and so grows
bigger : and the Church takes something from her surround-
ings, takes the souls of men from the world and incorporates
them into herself The leaven gives something to its surround-
ings, infects them with its own life ; so the Christian gospel
gives something to its surroundings ; communicates to man-
kind its own spirit of discipline and its own philosophy of life.
Both those processes, then, we should expect to see at work
when we watch the development of the Christian Church in
history.

And so far as the first part of the parable is concerned, the
lesson of the mustard tree, there is no great difficulty in
recognizing the description. Of course, it is quite true that the
growth of die Church in mere numbers is not a steady, uni-
form process ; it is chequered, again and again, by schisms and
heresies from within, by persecutions from without, by world
developments generally. But, in a sense, that makes it all the
more remarkable ; mere uninterrupted growth would not be
so strong a proof of life beating within as the power to re-
cover from a series of shocks and mutilations. This miracle
of the Church's continual reviviscence is recognized even by
outside, even by unfriendly critics. You probably know
Macaulay's almost despairing passage in the essay on von
Ranke, when he is writing about the state of Europe after the
French Revolution: "The Arabs have a fable that the Great
Pyramid was built by antediluvian kings, and alone of all the
works of men bore the weight of the flood. Such as this was
the fate of the Papacy. It had been buried under the great
inundation ; but its deep foundations had remained unshaken,
and when the waters abated, it appeared alone amidst the
ruins of a world which had passed away." That was written
a hundred years ago; but the testimony is true of our own

1 68 In Soft Garments

period, You have only to read history to realize that the
mustard seed has grown.

But the leaven has the leaven worked ? There you will not
find the critics of our religion forced into such attitudes of
unwilling admission. I think the criticism which we find it
most uncomfortable to meet is when they tell us that the
Catholic Church is all right when you consider it a priori, on
paper, as a system, but when you look at its actual record in
history you do not find its effects on human life the kind of
effects which you would expect a supernatural institution to
have. The world, to be sure, has advanced a great deal since
the times of our Lord. Slavery has given place to freedom,
savagery to kindness, selfishness to philanthropy ; men are no
longer (in the more favoured countries) executed for slight
offences, or tortured when they refuse to give evidence, or
killed in duels; some attempt is made, at any rate, to give
working men decent wages, and rescue them and their fami-
lies from destitution; and in a thousand other ways it is
possible to show that the world has become a more comfort-
able place to live in. But how much, we are asked, has all this
to do with Christianity, or at any rate with the Catholic
Church? Is it not true that the improvements which have
been made in the condition of human living have been
made, for the most part, without any effort of sympathy
on the part of Catholics, and sometimes in the teeth of
their opposition ? And if that is so, how can we claim that
the Catholic Church, as we find the Catholic Church in
history, is the Church which our Lord referred to in his
parables ? How strange that the leaven which has leavened the
world has not, noticeably at any rate, proceeded from her!

The answer to that kind of objectionis not art easy one, and
I think it is rather a humiliating one. Perhaps the simplest way
to put it is this. During the period between the Ascension and
the Reformation., that charge is not true. During the period

The Church and Human Progress 169

between the Reformation and the French Revolution that
charge is true, but it was not our fault ; in great measure at
least it was not our fault. In our own day, the situation has
grown so desperately complicated that it defies analysis.
What seems to emerge from it is that under modern condi-
tions we Catholics ought, more than ever, to be taking the
lead in enlightening the conscience of the world ; that, largely,
we are not doing it, and it is our fault that we are not doing it ;
and moreover, that in proportion as we do succeed in our
efforts, we shall not be given any credit for it ; we shall be
cried down as much as ever by the prophets of materialistic
humanitarianism for not going about it in a different and
more wholehearted way.

It is quite true that the Catholic Church has never made
social reform the first plank in her programme ; you might
say that where she leavens society she always does so in a fit
of absence of mind. Her message has always been addressed to
the individual soul, rather than to the political community.
St Paul could tell masters to be kind to their slaves, without
saying they must set them free ; and it was only gradually that
slavery itself, or even the cruel sports of the amphitheatre,
were abolished. It was only gradually that serfdom disap-
peared in the Middle Ages. But these changes did happen, and
in the meantime the world had learned more respect for
women, more sympathy for the poor; education became
more general, laws became less harsh in their enforcement, as
the spirit of the Christian religion asserted itself. You cannot
pick out the names of the great reformers, but that was
because the whole process was so gradual and almost un-
conscious ; gradual, yes, and unnoticed, but that is the way of
the leaven when it goes to work.

Since the Reformation, or perhaps you ought to say since
the great schism which divided the world shortly before the
Reformation, it has been true on the whole that the Church

iyo In Soft Garments

was no longer responsible for civilizing the world ; but then,
it was not altogether her fault. The Protestants, in the first
days of the Reformation, were not a yard ahead of her ; and
as late as the middle of the eighteenth century you could find
a man like Whitefield, the great Methodist preacher, owning
slaves. But the point is that the Church was on the defensive,
almost everywhere ; she had to consolidate her own position
against rival claimants; and she exhausted much of her
strength and of her sanctity in propaganda or in controversy.
Nor were the Popes able, in those days of stress and conten-
tion, to impose their will on Catholic nations. The worst evils
of slavery flourished, in spite of energetic protests ; duelling
was maintained by the social fashion of an age, in spite of
stringent condemnations of it. Again, it is to be remembered
that the most prominent Catholic nation during most of that
period was France ; and France was sitting very loose to its
ecclesiastical obedience ; the Pope's word did not run among
the French clergy as it runs nowadays. Catholics were too
much concerned over the future of the mustard seed to notice
much what was happening to the leaven.

With the French Revolution, a new phase sets in. In Eng-
land and in the United States you could hardly expect Catho-
lics to take any prominent share in the business of reform,
because their numbers were infinitesimal. In the various Euro-
pean countries where the Church was still strong, she found
herself everywhere attacked by the same people who were
using the language of humanitarianism and of reform. Men
were slow to distinguish her, and perhaps it must be admitted
that she was slow to distinguish herself, from those parties of
mere reaction which the new Liberalism assailed. And that
difficulty persists right down to our own day. Only, of
course, in our day the issues are not so direct as they seemed
in the last century. The cry for reform has given place to a cry
for revolution; the language of hate has replaced, among

The Church and Human Progress 171

the humanitarians, the language of love. And all over Europe
new nationalisms have grown up, sometimes friendly to the
Church, sometimes at issue with her, hut always in their
inspiration something foreign to her thought. Meanwhile,
both in our own country and still more across the Atlantic,
Catholic numbers have grown, especially among the more
educated classes, and the influences of the other Christianities
has waned, so that men look to the Church, more than they
did formerly, to tell them what the Christian religion really
preaches. That means that we have a greater responsibility
than our parents and our grandparents had for diffusing, in a
world that has begun to take notice of us, the leaven of Chris-
tian charity.

Only, don't think that we are going to get any credit for it.
Don't imagine I am suggesting that we Catholics ought to
take a greater share than we do in the fight for human happi-
ness because it will be good propaganda for our religion if we
do. For the whole of your lifetimes, probably, everything
that we Catholics do or propose to do in that line will be
viewed with suspicion, will be misrepresented; we shall be
told that we are only half-hearted reformers, trying to take
the wind out of other people's sails. That is because we cannot
afford to neglect principles, cannot afford to leave out one
half of the truth. We have got to love peace, without despis-
ing and belittling man's instinct of patriotism ; we have got to
redress injustice without violating essential human liberties ;
we have got to work for the relief of human misery without
defying the sanctities of the divine law. So we shall always
be at a disadvantage compared with other reformers who can
only see one set of principles at a time, and we shall get no
thanks for our interference.

Why is it, then, that we have got to take our part, more
than we did, in trying to make this temporary world of ours
a better place to live in? Because the Gospel of Christ is

172 In Soft Garments

essentially a leaven, a dynamic force in human affairs, and we
shall be false to our whole vocation if we treat the imperfec-
tions of human society as if they were something that didn't
matter. We shall be tempted to do so ; we are tempted to do
so. The world around us is so full of social experiments and of
party war-cries, and the people who are keen on these things
are generally such boring people to meet, that we are tempted
to throw ourselves back on our isolation and say, "Well,
there's no room in the world for any more reformers just
now ; as long as I live a decent Catholic life in private, I can
afford to spend my time dancing and going to the pictures
and getting all the fun out of life that I can." To do that is to
starve the instincts of your age and period, a dangerous thing
to do. Don't, for heaven's sake, imagine that I am recom-
mending you all to spend your time up here going to meet-
ings, signing petitions and carrying them round for other
people to sign, and contributing to the kind of book or maga-
zine which is understood to be the finest flower of recent
undergraduate thought. It is quite extraordinary what a lot of
good is not done by that sort of thing. No, what I am suggest-
ing is that, since you are here to be educated, you should pay
some attention whatever attention your ordinary work and
engagements permit to getting some grasp of the problems
which are exercising the modern world; and not merely
studying these in the light of your religion, so that you may
be able to give a good account of what the Church teaches,
and why, and why on certain subjects she has no special teach-
ing to offer, although everybody else in the world has a ready-
made solution of his own. I am suggesting that you should
prepare yourselves here for taking a decent amount of interest
in public affairs later on, and making your own contribution
to the needs of your time, according to your opportunities.

One word needs to be added, not less important. Our Lord
says that the mustard tree is to grow out of all recognition;

The Chtirch and Human Progress 173

lie doesn't say that it is to grow indefinitely ; does not mean us
to understand that there will ever be a time at which the
whole of mankind will be even nominally Christian. His
prophecy that his Gospel will be preached in the whole world
is sufficiently fulfilled if all mankind has a real chance of hear-
ing it. Similarly, when he says that the leaven hidden in the
meal spread till the whole was leavened, I don't think we are
necessarily to understand this as meaning that there will be a
time at which the principles of Christian charity towards one's
neighbour will dominate the counsels of humanity. We are
to understand that the Christian message will make itself felt
throughout the world which harbours it, not necessarily that
it will triumph. Don't be disappointed, therefore, if it appears
it may perfectly well come to appear so in your lifetime as
if things were going backwards instead of forwards, as if the
world were relapsing into barbarism instead of following
along the path marked out for it by what we call civilization*
Don't be disappointed, above all, if during your lifetime the
Church, despite her best efforts, still seems to be fighting a
rearguard action, and losing, if anything, in the modern
struggle for existence. As I said before, the social influence of
the Church is in reality a by-product of her activity ; it is not
her life. Her business, ultimately, is with the individual soul,
and the promises by which she lives are not limited within
these narrow horizons. The leaven is there, and it does not
lose its virtue with the centuries. But whether in our par-
ticular age the time is ripe for its manifestation, that we can-
not know. God's view is longer than ours, and for all we can
tell we may be living in the early Church still; our modem
troubles may be only the growing-pains of Christianity. It
will be our fault if we lose heart.

XX
THE THREE MORALITIES

WANT to give you a sort of sketch of the
history of Christian morals, with special
reference to the cleavage between the
Catholic and the Protestant notions of
morality since the Reformation, and the
onsequences of that cleavage in the thought of our own
Lay, It is an extremely elaborate subject, about which I am
Iways hoping to write an enormous book in two volumes,
nit I don't see when I am going to get the time. This sketch,
berefbre, will be very sketchy indeed.

I think the thing that puzzles us about Christian morals, if
r ou come to think of it, is the question : Does the Church
:eep two codes of morals, one for the saint and one for the
inner? One code which is meant for those who aspire to
perfection, represented by the teaching of the Sermon on the
/fount ; and another for ordinary people, represented by the
aoral theology books which are always defining the exact
onditions of a mortal sin, and almost encouraging us we
Dmetimes feel to commit venial sins by showing us what a
>t of sinful actions there are which nevertheless do not cut
s off from sanctifying grace ? And if there are really two
odes, what is the relation between them ? Well, the history of
Christian morals is very largely concerned with that point. It
very largely the history of a refusal, on the part of the
"atholic Church, to draw the minimum line of Christian

174

The Three Moralities 175

conduct too high ; so high that in our imperfect world a great
number of souls would be unable to live up to it, or even to
see any hope of living up to it, and therefore would drop
away from the practice of religion in despair. Whereas the
heretics in all ages, the Montanists in the first age of the
Church, the Jansenists in days whose influence has scarcely
died out even now, were always for tightening things up ; for
binding Christians, as if under pain of mortal sin, to a rule of
perfection, very admirable in itself and very desirable if you
could enforce it, but not meant, so it seems, for our imperfect
world. As Mr Arnold Lunn put it, in a correspondence which
he and I published, "The Catholic Church realizes that she
cannot afford to be too exclusive. In the course of nineteen
centuries she has at least made one great discovery; she has
learned that sinners sometimes sin. And as a result Catholicism
is more successful than Protestantism in retaining the affec-
tionate loyalty of the erring."

I don't think there can be much doubt that the very early
Church had stricter views on moral subjects than we have.
There are many reasons for that. All the early Christians were
converts, and in the first fervours of their conversion they
meant business. Many of them, probably, imagined that it
could not be long now before our Lord returned to earth for
the final judgment; they lived with the feeling that the sky
might at any moment crack above their heads. The fact of
becoming Christians marked them off sharply from the pagan
world which surrounded them; and the daily spectacle of
heathen immoralities drove them, by reaction, into a fervour
of revolt. Before long, too, persecution began ; and that
meant that the Church was purged of her weaker members
and only attracted those souls who were prepared to make
heroic efforts in order to achieve salvation. Accordingly, you
will find the early Fathers condemning, wholesale, various
kinds of dissipation which nowadays we should only consider

176 In Soft Garments

wrong for some people or in some circumstances the
theatre, for example, or dancing ; you will find that the ideal
of virginity is preached with a wealth of rhetorical expression
which makes the unsympathetic modern reader imagine that
Christians think of marriage as something wicked; you will
find terrifically heavy penances imposed, according to our
modern ideas, for various offences, especially for giving way
under persecution and going through the formality of offer--
ing incense to the heathen gods. Yes, we sometimes feel that
the early Church wouldn't have been quite the place for you
and me ; but even in the early Church you find exaggerations
of that tendency; you find a rigorism which the Church has
to disown, at the risk of making those who are its preachers
fall away into heresy.

The Montanists were the first ; they are an extraordinarily
interesting set of people, and bear a strong resemblance to
some of the Puritan sects which arose in later days. You
cannot read far in the writings of Tertullian, their great cham-
pion, without coming across the most exaggerated descrip-
tions of the world's wickedness and the holiness which is
demanded of all Christians. One particular notion of theirs,
which serves to illustrate their point of view, is that a widow
who married again was committing mortal sin. The early
Church didn't encourage second marriages very much ; you
will see in the New Testament diat the "widows" formed a
separate and honoured body among die congregation ; a very
formidable body, one would think. But it wasn't enough for
the Montanists to exalt widowhood as a kind of state of per-
fection; they would have it that remarriage was actually
wrong. Then there were the Novatians, who held that a man
who had once lapsed in time of persecution could never be
restored to Communion, even at the moment of death; and
there were the Donatists, who held that bishops and priests
who had given up copies of the sacred books to heathen

The Three Moralities 177

pursuivants lost, ipso facto, the validity of their ordination. In
these cases, the Church let herself in for the competition of
powerful schisms, which lasted for centuries, rather than fall
in with their over-strict ideas ; rather than admit that genuine
contrition can be unavailing, or that the validity of a priest's
acts can depend on the holiness of his life. It wasn't that the
Church, in the main, disapproved of the ideals preached by
these heretics, but she wouldn't have those ideals forced down
everybody's throat as a condition of being a member of the
Christian Church at all.

Chesterton in his book on St Francis has a very interest-
ing chapter, in which he works out the idea that the
Church during the later empire and the dark ages was going
through a period of expiation, of atonement, for the sins of
the pagan world which went before it. The Christian message
had to be something that seems to us severe, that seems to us
gloomy, because the world, then, was painfully purging out
of its system the poisons of pagan degeneracy. It was in the
twelfth century, he says, that Christians began to be able to
look on the natural beauty of the world and enjoy all God's
gifts in the natural creation without feeling that there was
something corrupt, something defiling about diem.

In die early Middle Ages you see, for a moment, the natural
instincts of man and his supernatural hope reduced to a har-
mony ; you see it in all the pageantry and the fun and the
chivalry and the revival of art which, in spite of all the wars
and all the horrors, mark out that period of human history in
gold. Then corruption set in again ; and as a protest against
that corruption you get movements like those of the Wal-
denses and the Poor Men of Lyons, criticizing the worldliness
of priests and of bishops, and the luxuries of the times in
general; you get Wyclif and the Lollards threatening the
fabric of society by claiming that a landlord has no title to his
possessions unless he is a good Christian. Once again, you see,

1 78 In Soft Garments

the reaction against worldliness, a reaction perfectly justified
in itself, takes heretical form by wanting to go too far. And
so it leads up to the Reformation. We shall deceive ourselves
if we think of the Reformation as merely a matter of doctrinal
differences, or merely a conflict between the new nobilities
and the old tradition of Europe. In part, at least, the Reforma-
tion was a genuine protest against the corrupt state of morals
which followed on the Renaissance. And where the Refor-
mers got the upper hand, uncontrolled by secular princes,
they overdid their part by trying to introduce a discipline far
stricter than the discipline of the Catholic Church had been
before them. In Scotland, for example, a person guilty of
adultery who refused to submit to the discipline of the Kirk
was put under the greater excommunication, solemnly given
over into the power and hands of the devil, and outlawed
from Christian society. If the Reformation had really
succeeded, the sinners of Europe would have lived under con-
ditions of intolerable oppression.

The Reformation did not succeed ; kings and courts were
too strong for it, and it made terms with the world after all.
But it left its mark on society by creating, among certain
classes, a tradition of Puritanism which has not yet died out.
In England and Scotland, at any rate, a system of rigorism in
morals commended itself to, and imbedded itself in, the
mentality of the lower middle class. I am not saying that
contemptuously, though you will often find such terms used
in contempt. A class that has to be frugal, has to maintain a
certain standard of respectability, that is excluded from the
freer activities of the landed gentry, easily develops and clings
to a tradition of Puritanism. There is no room for it in the
theatre ; it is too poor for the dress circle, too refined for the
pit. It has no money to waste on racing or on gambling ; it is
too superior to join in the rough dances of the countryside,
too provincial to acquire the manners of the ballroom.

The Three Moralities 179

Finally, in England, though not in Scotland, it loses the tradi-
tion of drinking intoxicants, because it is too proud for the
public houses and cannot afford to belong to clubs; so a
temperance movement rounds off the completeness of the
Puritan mentality. That mentality ruled England yesterday,
and is making a hard struggle against defeat at this moment.
It still wants to enforce a stricter morality by law, in the same
spirit in which Calvin and John Knox made the attempt three
and a half centuries ago.

In Catholic countries, and in a Catholic society which
manages to maintain itself, as ours did for more than two
centuries, quite outside the general life of the nation, this
Puritan ideal has never ruled. You get approaches to it ; the
tendency in our own Church is labelled, rather loosely, by the
seventeenth-century nickname of Jansenism. The Cure d' Ars
at the beginning of last century was not satisfied until he had
banished dancing altogether from his parish ; and even to-day,
where the influence of the priesthood is strong, as in Ireland
or in French Canada, you will find it exercised, sometimes, in
a rather rigorist spirit. But it is an influence that remains
personal ; a Catholic society, however strict in its views, has
no itch for moral legislation, such as Puritanism has. It will
only frame laws for the repression of vice where it is necessary
to preserve the whole structure of social life, as, for example,
in the matter of legalized divorce.

Now, when a society goes pagan, as our society is going
pagan hand over hand that is not pulpit rhetoric, it is plain
fact for anybody who takes the trouble to think you get
three distinct reactions on the part of Christian thought.
There is the Puritan reaction; the reaction of the ordinary
Protestant mind which has never been captured by Puritan-
ism; and the reaction of the Catholic minority. The public
effort of Puritanism is a wild attempt to resist all the proposals
it dislikes, without distinguishing between them; no sweep-

1 80 In Soft Garments

stakes, no Sunday cinemas, no penny off beer, no, no, no.
And where you have a revival of religion among non-Catho-
lics it will fall, automatically, into the Puritan way of think-
ing, because that has become traditional with us ; so that your
Buchmatiite, if one may judge by the scraps of information
one gets about that movement, will tend even to think of
smoking as something inconsistent with the Christian life,
instead of an indulgence which, like other indulgences, may
laudably be given up by a person aiming at perfection.

On the other hand, the non-Puritan Protestant public finds
itself completely at sea ; it does not know what attitude to
adopt towards the paganizing of life. You see, for years, and
you may almost say for centuries, the only reason the ordin-
ary EngHshman has known for not doing a thing was because
it was something that was not done. But when something
that was not done suddenly turns into something that is done,
all his standards are upset. To take a very small and not an
important instance of what I mean, women making up their
faces was, thirty years ago, among the things that were not
done ; not officially, anyhow, not in public. And, of course,
that applies to more serious things ; it applies, for example,
to divorce. Your ordinary Englishman is absolutely bewil-
dered on that point. He knows that divorce was not done
thirty years ago, and that it is done now ; was it wrong then?
Is it right now ? He has no standard to judge by, since he took
to picking holes in the Bible. That is the real reason why we
are always seeing the old question discussed, though by now
we are thoroughly bored with it, whether our age is degener-
ate or not. The older generation has a standard of what is done
which differs from that of the younger generation. And when
the younger generation says, " Ah, but you were just as much
a rebel in the eighteen-nineties," the older generation, if it had
any sense, would reply, "Yes, and you will be just as much of
a stick-in-the-mud in the nineteen-seventies." You must have

The Three Moralities 181

fixed standards if you are to discuss these things, and they have
none; I mean, the great bulk of more or less Anglican
Englishmen has none.

The Catholic reaction to the same tendency is different
from either. You cannot call it Puritan, even when it protests
against the age ; for it distinguishes between the importance
of the various issues ; it is not clouded by a mist of middle-
class tradition, does not mistake indulgence as such for sin.
Nor yet does it deserve to be called Victorian, because evi-
dently it does not reflect the fashion of a single century. It is
strong in controversy, because it takes its stand on unalterable
moral principle ; not mere ecclesiastical legislation, but the
law written in men's hearts. Only, that does not mean that as
Catholics we shall avoid all the bother of argument and find
ourselves universally respected. We shall find that people are
for ever trying to persuade us that our outlook is mediaeval,
because we stand apart from the sex-madness of our genera-
tion. And it makes us unpopular ; people laugh at the Puritan
but they do not laugh at the Catholic, they feel they are up
against something too hard and too formidable for that. A
quite new hatred of the Catholic religion is growing up, has
grown up within my own lifetime ; a hatred of its strict
principles on certain points, which our neighbours, though
their own liberty of action is not in the least interfered
with, dislike as being a criticism of their own conduct, and
a criticism which in their heart of hearts they know to
be just.

We Catholics have not only to do our best to keep down
our own warring passions and live decent lives, which will
often be hard enough in this odd world we have been born
into. We have to bear witness to moral principles which the
world owned yesterday, and has begun to turn its back on
to-day. We have to disapprove of some of the things our
neighbours do, without being stuffy about it; we have to be

1 82 In Soft Garments

charitable towards our neighbours and make great allow-
ances for them, without falling into the mistake of condoning
their low standards and so encouraging them in sin. Two of
the most difficult and delicate tasks a man can undertake ; and
it happens, nowadays, not only to priests, to whom it comes
as part of their professional duty, but to ordinary lay people.
It will come to you, the first time you are asked to be best man
at the wedding of a divorce. So we must know what are the
unalterable principles we hold, and why we hold them ; we
must see straight in a world that is full of moral fog.

XXI
MORALITY AND CONVENTION

T is the nature of the undergraduate to discuss
all things in heaven and earth with the utmost
seriousness and sometimes with very slight
information. And I suppose that those inter-
minable conversations which go on, year after
year, in these venerable buildings don't vary much from year
to year in their character. I can imagine that buildings like
Mob Quad at Merton or the Cottages at Worcester, if they
had feelings to express and voices to express them, would
protest that they were horribly bored by now with these
ceaseless repetitions. Only I suppose there is a slight alteration,
from decade to decade, in the choice of themes and the
amount of attention devoted to each. I should say, offhand,
that before the 1914-18 war the questions most discussed at
Oxford were questions of public interest; we were all going
to reform the world, by being Socialists or Christian Socialists
or young Tories or missionaries or social workers or Nietz-
schians or proconsuls or philanthropic millionaires ; looking
back, I can't say that we seem to have done much in that line.
Whereas nowadays I fancy that the subjects which command
general attention are more self-centred, and very pardonably
so. The modern question is "How am I to live?" first of all
in the eminently practical sense, "How on earth am I going
to make a living?" (a question which we never considered
twenty years ago), and then in the more philosophical sense,
7 183

1 84 In Soft Garments

"By what principles (if any) am I personally going to regulate
my life?"

The reason why people ask the question "How am I to
live?" in the first sense is, clearly, because there aren't nearly
so many jobs going. The reason why they ask the second
question is, I suppose, mainly what we call in the newspaper
headlines and elsewhere "The Breakdown of Convention."
Let us stop for a moment at that phrase, and remember what
it means. A convention is a rule which all parties agree to
abide by for purposes of convenience. Thus it is a convention
in England that you should drive on the left-hand side of the
road, and it is a convention in most other countries that you
should drive on the right-hand side of the road ; that is the
sort of convention that doesn't break down, and there are a
great many other things that would break down if it did. But
that is a convention which exists to protect public safety;
another set of conventions exists to protect public morality.
For instance, it used to be common in Eastern countries, and
it is still the practice in certain Eastern countries, that women
should never appear in public without having their faces
veiled up to the eyes. Nobody pretended that it was actually
immoral for a woman to appear unveiled, but rightly or
wrongly it was supposed that it would be a safeguard in the
interests of morality.

Now, it's quite certain that a good many conventions of
that kind have recently disappeared in our own country, for
better or for worse. The institution of the chaperone is an
obvious instance; the very name, now, has an old-fashioned
ring about it It would be silly to go into details. And people
are very fond of pointing out it's quite true as far as it goes
that such conventions have in themselves no moral value ;
indeed, that they have a tendency to make morality hypo-
critical and unreal. And they go on to talk about "conven-
tional morality," and say (or imply) that everybody would

Morality and Convention 185

be as bad as everybody else if they weren't so frightened of
outraging public standards of respectability.

That, of course, is a lie as it stands, but it has this much
truth in it that people of an unadventuf ous turn of mind,
more especially when they have no strong religious lights to
guide them, are affected in their conduct, more than they
know, by the general standards of respectability in which they
grow up. There is such a thing as herd-morality. You notice it
especially in a matter like divorce, where social considerations
necessarily apply. I suppose there were hundreds of people in
society thirty years ago who would have gone into the
divorce court without a scruple except for the fear of being
cut in polite society & fear which would be quite unneces-
sary to-day. But the same principle applies even when there is
no question of public stigma. People do manage to keep
straight just because there is a strong moral tone in the society
around them a moral tone which makes itself felt in a
variety of social conventions. And the danger, of course, is
that they should confuse propriety with morality. The danger
is that in taking the laws of morality and the conventions of
propriety equally for granted, they should assume that the
two things stand or fall together. And then, if the proprieties
go, the moral principles for such people will go too.

Those are the people who are asking nowadays, "Why
shouldn't I?" And the obvious answer is, "If you think
morality a mere matter of social convention, if you are only
concerned to consider what other people will say about you,
there's no reason why you shouldn't." Nobody will think
very much the worse of such a man nowadays if his irregu-
larities are not too blatant. And if he cannot see that morality
means something more than a code of human conventions,
there is no more to be done with him. What we have to try
and persuade him of is: First, that there are such things as
right and wrong. Second, that the art of living, and, if I may

1 86 In Soft Garments

so describe it, the fun of living, can be found only in regulat-
ing your life according to fixed principles of conduct. Third,
that there is one single standard of morality, ideally for all
people, and practically for all Christian people. And fourth,
that if you are really a Christian, the irksomeness of merely
obeying negative rules is exchanged for the positive joy of
trying to live so as to please our Lord Jesus Christ.

First, there are such things as right and wrong. Whatever
else in our human judgments is merely convention, this at
least is a fixed principle, that some courses of action deserve to
be rewarded, and others deserve to be punished. That whole
notion of reward and punishment, of praise and blame, is an
elementary notion, born in us, otherwise it could never have
got into us. Every attempt to explain away our moral judg-
ments as merely aesthetic or merely utilitarian has completely
broken down. It's quite possible to mistake a wrong action
for a right one, like the man who assassinates a tyrant. It is
quite possible to mistake a right action for a wrong one, like
die people who think it is wicked to fight for your country
even in a just quarrel. But if right and wrong didn't exist, it
would have been quite impossible for such a mistake to arise
as to suppose that they did. The human mind has no creative
power to have invented for itself such phantasies.

Second, the art of living depends upon living by a rule of
conduct, and it is that, really, which lends zest and interest to
the performance. Of course, it's true that we've got to make a
living, and that struggle lends a certain zest and interest to
life ; but so far we are no better off than the beasts they too
must struggle for their daily food. But Man, as an intellectual
creature, is meant to have a fuller life than this; he has a
character to form of which, under God, he is the architect.
And any form of art demands rules that you are to work by,
laws of harmony, laws of proportion, and so on. To be the
artist of his own character, Man must have laws, outside of

Morality and Convention 187

himself and higher than himself, to which he is to conform
his operations. You may go further than, that, and say that all
art demands an ideal, an ideal which the artist wishes to
translate into reality. A man, then, must have ideals to live
by ; he must want to translate those ideals into reality in his
own character. Generally speaking, he has some hero whom
he imitates, to whose character he would like to assimilate his
own. And the Christian sets before himself the highest of all
ideals of character, to imitate as far as possible the life of our
Lord Jesus Christ. He is the Hero, the Model, whose linea-
ments we want to translate, with however faltering a hand,
on to the canvas of our own lives. A man who is entirely
unmoral, if such a creature could exist, would be one who has
never tasted life at all.

Next, this law of conduct is the same ideally for all man-
kind. People talk sometimes about the difference between
heathen and Christian morality, and wonder whether perhaps
pagan morality wasn't a finer thing. But, of course, in their
broad outlines there is no difference between Christian and
pagan morality at all. The Christian Church didn't suddenly
impose on the world a set of moral sentiments of which it had
never heard before, a set of moral sentiments with which it
violently disagreed. How could Christianity have spread so
suddenly and so easily if it had not found a response in the
consciences of those to whom it was preached? No, the
pagans knew well enough what was right in theory, valued
fidelity in married people, continence in young people, even
virginity as a form of self-devotion ; they knew it was wrong
to lie and steal and quarrel and all the rest of it, just as we do.
It is possible, of course, for the human conscience to grow
blunted, it is possible, therefore, for false standards of morals
to prevail, for people to get wrong ideas about the im-
portance of this virtue or that. But the human conscience
does admire virtue when it sees it. It can get the values of

1 88 In Soft Garments

things wrong, but it doesn't hate good or admire evil for its
own sake.

Only, when all that's said and done, the human conscience
is such a wavering and uncertain instrument that it does as a
matter of fact need a code of morals, guaranteed by a super-
natural revelation, if it is to keep its true direction. That's
not a dogma ; it's an ordinary fact of experience. I don't mean
that the individual necessarily needs a religion to make him
lead a decent life; but the effect upon society of a decline in
religion is always a decline in moral standards. And that is
why, as I'm always telling you, other people up here are
secretly envying you, try and drag you into the conversation
when they talk about such things at the back of their minds
they wish that they had your certainty to form the back-
ground of their lives.

XXII
CUTTING THE KNOT

|HE Catholic Church forbids divorce" so
we are always reading in the newspapers.
Of course, that isn't true. It isn't the
Catholic Church which forbids divorce;
Almighty God forbids divorce, and all
the Catholic Church does is to say she's very sorry, but
there it is ; the Divine Law will not allow a marriage to be
dissolved, so she is afraid she can't very well do anything
about it. If it was the Church that had made this law, she
would be able to dispense people from this law ; the whole
point of the situation is that the Church is powerless ; she
can do nothing. She can no more prevent a person who has
two wives being in mortal sin than she can prevent a person
who falls off a precipice breaking his neck. It is not part of her
legislation that a married man should not remarry. It is part of
her doctrine that a married man cannot remarry, so long as
his first wife is alive. If he goes through the form of
marriage, it is an empty farce. Now, let's see what grounds
we have for saying that; let us examine it on the three usual
grounds of Scripture, of ecclesiastical tradition, and of
human common-sense.

"We know from Scripture, not merely that our Lord taught
the indissolubility of marriage, but that he taught this as part
of the natural law. In the beginning it was not so ; Moses,
for the hardness of their heart, allowed the Jews to divorce

189

190 In Soft Garments

their wives in certain aggravated circumstances that means,
in all probability, that the Mosaic law allowed the Jews to
divorce their wives for fear that if they weren't allowed to
divorce them they would strangle them. How it was exactly
that this special dispensation was allowed to the Jews we don't
know, all we know is that it was a special dispensation, and
one which has now been abrogated by our Lord himself. In
the beginning it was not so ; God made human kind male and
female; he intended that a man should leave father and
mother and cleave to his wife. In all sorts of primitive societies
all sorts of marriage customs have prevailed; there have been
societies in which men had a plurality of wives, in which
women had a plurality of husbands ; but all that was a
degradation, a deviation from the natural law ; by his nature,
man is monogamous. And it's no good saying that this is
unscientific, because the other animals aren't monogamous ;
that parallel doesn't hold. For one thing, the institution of the
family is natural to man, and the institution of the family
would become impossible if every man took a fresh wife each
spring. For another thing, man is an intellectual creature, and
therefore it is foolish to expect that he would be content to
live by laws of mere casual instinct. For another thing it is
absurd to allow free love unless you also allow free hate ; if
men are to be allowed to fall in love right and left as the beasts
do, then men must be allowed to kill one another right and
left, as the beasts do. A civilized society must of necessity have
some settled principles of marriage ; and the principle at which
all such societies aim, although they don't always achieve the
aim perfectly by any means, is the principle of monogamy.

Even if that weren't so, even if mankind before the Incar-
nation had been left without any moral principles in the
matter, it would still remain true that for us Christian people
marriage is a bond which cannot be dissolved, because our
Divine Lord has positively laid it down that this should be so.

Cutting the Knot 191

Once in St Mark and once in St Luke, in a deliberate answer
made to the Pharisees who were questioning him upon this
precise point, our Lord says quite roundly that the man who
puts away his wife and marries another is guilty of adultery.
Now, it's quite true that there are two parallel passages in St
Matthew where our Lord seems to say that a man .may put
away his wife on the ground of her misconduct, and in one of
those two passages he even seems to imply that in such cir-
cumstances a man may remarry. That's quite true, but it
doesn't alter the situation. If you take the Protestant higher
critical point of view, and say that St Matthew here is in
contradiction with the other two Evangelists, then you must
prefer their authority to his. For, on the Protestant higher
critical reckoning, St Matthew is later than St Mark, and
where the two differ, St Mark's account is the original
account. There is something splendidly unselfconscious about
a man who says (as an Anglican divine said the other day)
that in every other part of the Gospel we must prefer St Mark
to St Matthew, but just here, just because it happens to suit
our book, we must prefer St Matthew to St Mark. As Catho-
lics, of course we have to admit that the discrepancy between
the Evangelists is only apparent, and there are so many differ-
ences of reading, and of possible rendering, in the passage,
that the sense of St Matthew and St Mark can be harmonized
in more ways than one without doing any violence to the
principles of criticism.

As a matter of fact, we have independent evidence of
Christian practice in the matter which is possibly older than
any of the Gospels I mean St Paul's reference in his first
epistle to the Corinthians. "But to those who are married it
is not I that speak, but the Lord, that a woman should not
separate from her husband (or if she does so she must remain
unmarried till she is reconciled to her husband), and that a
man should not put away his wife." This, then, was how the

192 In Soft Garments

earliest apostles understood our Lord's words ; there was no
exception made in view of marital misconduct. And else-
where, in writing to the Ephesians, St Paul gives the reason
for this attitude of the New Dispensation towards matrimony.
Marriage, he says, is a musterion, a Sacrament; it is the type of
the union between Christ and his Church. Christian marriage,
then, must be the mirror of the indissoluble bond which
unites the one Christ and his one Church.

And this has been the practice of the Church ever since.
One or two local synods in the dark ages tried to make
exceptions in favour of the wronged husband or the wronged
wife, but such local legislation was always repudiated by the
Church, and her stricter standard enforced. She has always
permitted judicial separation, on sufficient grounds, but such
separation does not make it possible for either party to re-
marry. The principle holds good that a valid and consummated
Christian marriage is a bond that kinds till death. I say a Christian
marriage, because St Paul himself in the passage I quoted
allows the newly converted husband or wife of a heathen to
separate and even to remarry, if there is danger to the faith of
the Christian party as the result of fidelity to the bond. Theo-
logians dispute as to the grounds on which this extraordinary
privilege was conceded. It was conceded, in any case, only to
those who had been married as unbaptized heathens, in times
of bitter persecution, and to-day it is scarcely heard of. I say a
consummated marriage, because it is in the power of the
Holy See to dissolve a marriage if as a matter of fact the two
parties have never lived together as man and wife. And I say
a valid marriage, because if it can be proved legally that the
marriage was invalid from the beginning owing to some flaw
in the proceedings, then the obligation, which was only an
imaginary obligation, naturally ceases.

Every now and then there is trouble over this business I
have just mentioned, as there was the other day. What we

Cutting the Knot 193

have to explain to our Protestant friends is this, that a decree
of nullity is not the dissolution of a marriage, it is the legal
assertion that there has never been any marriage at all. Let me
illustrate that difference. Suppose I'm playing patience; I
sometimes do. Suppose the game is going badly, and I shuffle
the cards and start again that isn't playing the game ; that's
like divorce. But suppose I find that five, six, seven and eight
of the same suit come out one after another then I say to
myself, " These cards haven't been shuffled properly, I must
reshuffle and start again" that's fair enough, that's like the
decree of nullity. I'm not altering the conditions of the prob-
lem, I'm only stating that the conditions of the problem were
wrong from the start. Of course, our enemies will always say
that the Catholic Church uses decrees of nullity as a conve-
nient substitute for divorce, especially where rich people are
concerned. That is a cowardly libel I say a libel, because it's
both untrue and damaging; I say cowardly, because it's
directed at an institution which cannot sue them for libel. It's
quite easy, as a matter of fact, to give instances of poor people
who have succeeded in getting a decree of nullity, and in-
stances of rich and powerful people who have tried to get a
decree of nullity and failed.

We Catholics, then, are people who don't recognize the
possibility of divorce, in the sense in which that word is
ordinarily used, living in a world which is beginning to have
standards quite different from ours. People with no religion
in particular think divorce quite as natural a thing as marriage ;
even Christians outside the Church are in two minds about it
all. Now, apart from tradition, which is the sensible view, ours
or theirs ?

The point we've got to make them realize is this, that
whereas Christian marriage, whatever else it is, is a principle,
divorce isn't a principle at all, it's only a frantic expedient, a
desperate compromise. If all marriages were terminable on

194 In Soft Garments

either side after five years, or ten years, then that would be an
intelligible principle, though I fancy it would lead to a good
deal of trouble. Or if we treated marriage merely as a matter
of legal partnership, and either side could buy themselves out
whenever they liked for a good substantial sum of money, that
would be an intelligible principle. But you see we don't do
that. We all rally round and sing hymns about the Voice that
breathed o'er Eden, and the bride and bridegroom solemnly
swear that nothing except death is going to part them, and
there are wedding-bells and orange-blossom and old shoes
and all the rest of it, and the bride has her married initials
stamped on all her wedding presents, and then then five
years afterwards we come to die conclusion that we made a
mistake about it, and die two soul-mates weren't soul-mates
after all, and the things have to go back to the shop to have
fresh initials engraved on diem. That's because we're so
incurably sentimental, we English. We like to revel in the
sentiment of marriage for better, for worse, for richer, for
poorer, in sickness and in health, and so on; but when it
comes to the point we find that we don't want our own
phrases to mean anything. When Rossetti's wife died, he
stood at the graveside and flung the MS. of his unpublished
poems into it. Later on, when he was hard up, he dug them
up and published them. That's what I call sentimentalism.
You do something irrevocable, and then revoke it.

You see, it's all very well to have exceptional legislation for
exceptional cases as long as you can make sure that the
number of cases is limited. But if you grant legal divorce on
grounds of marital infidelity it means, in the first place, that
you set a premium on marital infidelity itself; it means, in the
second place, that people who are merely bored with one
another will be tempted to commit (or to pretend they have
committed) offences against fidelity, in order to get a divorce.
And the result is a sort of hybrid society where nobody knows

Cutting the Knot 195

whether marriage is an indissoluble bond or not; where,
consequently, the best people suffer from the situation, and
the worst take advantage of it ; where numbers of children
are brought up without proper parental control ; where the
sacramental character of marriage, and even the institution
itself, is being brought into such contempt that some people
are prepared to think we would be better without it, and are
prepared to act on that belief. And all this, of course, is only
just starting.*

I say we're all in a mess ; the condition of things in which
we live is an interim condition of things, and sooner or later
the world has got to make up its mind. It must either throw
overboard the principle of Christian marriage altogether,
replacing it by some different and less permanent kind of
contract, or else it must return to the principle that marriage
is indissoluble, in spite of the hardship which that principle
sometimes brings to individuals, for the sake of general
decency and general order. But while the present inconsistent,
sentimental attitude prevails, we Catholics have a very clear
duty. We must not give people the impression that Catholics
abstain from divorce just as they abstain from eating meat on
Fridays, as if it were a piece of tiresome ecclesiastical legisla-
tion over which Rome is rather old-fashioned, which affects
us without affecting our neighbours. It is a law of God,
written in man's heart ; it is a law of Christ, solemnly promul-
gated by him to the world. THs duty, then, of preserving the
sanctity of marriage falls upon every intellectual creature in so
far as his conscience is rightly informed; it falls especially
upon those who call themselves Christians and profess to live
by the rule of Jesus Christ. "We aren't therefore to talk, you
and I, among our non-Catholic friends as if divorce was a
thing which didn't matter except where Catholics are con-
cerned. We aren't to register our votes, you and I, for any

* This was written in 1929.

196 In Soft Garments

party or any movement which is pledged, to further legislation
in the direction of free divorce. And later on, when you've
settled down in life and have a household of your own, it will
be for you to make certain that, as far as possible, your own
social example shall be such as to discourage lax views on the
subject. I don't mean that it's possible nowadays to refuse
altogether to meet people who have been through the divorce
courts ; it is too late for open protest of that kind to be effec-
tive. But in your own choice of friends and in your own exer-
cise of hospitality you wiR have, to some small degree, the
opportunity of influencing the world around you. And we
Catholics, remember, are to be the salt of the world, the
leaven of human society. That duty of ours becomes, I think,
daily more apparent.

I will add one word more, I hope it is unnecessary. If you
marry, whether you marry a Protestant or another Catholic,
you will marry as a Catholic, and will be understood to be
binding yourself under the marriage obligation in a Catholic
sense. The Catholic, therefore, who afterwards attempts to
get a divorce from his wife is not only being a traitor to his
religion, he is being a traitor to his own honour. For it is
understood that, whatever other people may mean by their
marriage vows, Catholics understand those vows to be ter-
minable only by death, and accept them in that sense. A girl
will confide her own happiness to you with all the more con-
fidence because she feels sure that you, being a Catholic, can
never look forward to another marriage as long as she lives.
And to disappoint that faith of hers is to add treachery to
sacrilege. On the other side, if you do marry a non-Catholic,
for heaven's sake make sure that she understands the marriage
vow in the same sense in which you understand it; that is
mere prudence in your own defence.

XXIII
UNSELFISHNESS IN MARRIAGE

OVE is essentially the effort to sacrifice your-
self, to immolate yourself, to another person.
And passion is essentially the effort to sacrifice,
to immolate, another person to yourself. The
man who finds in beauty only something
which he must at all costs possess ; who finds in innocence
something which must be spoilt and defaced, for him; in
modesty, something which must be overcome, that he may
score a personal triumph ; in infidelity, the opportunity of
enriching his own experience with as great a variety as
possible of amatory adventure that man is guilty of passion;
he is an egoist from first to last. And there is a corresponding
egoism on the part of women, which there is no need to dis-
cuss here. Contrariwise, the lover's instinct is to devote him-
self, to be of service, at whatever cost to his own leisure or
his own dignity ; nay, to obliterate himself if need be, and
pass out of the life of the woman he loves, rather than spoil
her happiness or interfere with the highest realization of her
character that is love.

So much difference, you see, a whole world of difference,
between two experiences either of which is described, in
common parlance, as "falling in love." So much difference
between the two attitudes in which a man can lead a woman
to the altar. I don't suggest that this difference constitutes the

whole morality of the affair. Often enough marriages take

197

198 In Soft Garments

place, and are regarded by the outside world as "happy"
marriages, which are really spoilt by selfishness on the part of
husband or wife ; there is no breach of the sixth command-
ment, and yet two lives are baulked of their fruition by this
means. I don't say that selfish passion necessarily leads to
tragedy in marriage ; I only say that there is constant danger
of it. And on the other side, so weak are we men, so little right
have we to judge one another, that you can certainly point to
guilty love affairs, such as incur God's displeasure, in which
there is nevertheless unselfish love on both sides, a good
quality devoted to a bad end. I don't say that -unselfish love
always and necessarily protects men and women from sinful
actions ; I only say that it gives the best hope of such protec-
tion. Unselfish love is less likely to give rise to moral delin-
quency ; and if it does, we can dare to hope that God will
judge it more mercifully.

Well, all that sounds very flat and obvious, and rather like
the advice column in Home Notes. But, you know, this
question of selfishness does lie at the very root of all our
present confusion in social life. You see, I suppose it is true
to say that women are naturally more unselfish than men ; it is
hard to imagine that it could be otherwise, since women have
to undergo all the altruistic labour of bringing up children.
And I think you can say that there has, before our time, been
a constant tendency on the part of man to exploit the un-
selfishness of woman. In all legislation, in all our social judg-
ments, it is quite true to say that the scales have been weighted
in favour of our sex. What was sauce for goose hasn't been
sauce for gander, in our common, worldly estimation in
Christian morals the parity of position has always been recog-
nized. And not only has there been a tendency to condone
the man who is loose in his relations with women outside of
wedlock, but in marriage itself men have always been, and
still are, too ready to treat their wives selfishly, unfeelingly,

Unselfishness in Marriage 199

inconsiderately, in all the delicate relations of die married
state. Men have expected their wives to be echoes and
shadows of themselves, instead of realizing that they have lives
of their own to live, personalities of their own to express. I
wish any of you ever read Meredith's book, The Egoist. It is
not much read nowadays, because it is full of thought, and
people don't like to be made to think when they read novels,
they like to have the thinking done for them. It's a profound
psychological study of how egoism can kill a romance, what
frantic efforts it will make to reconstruct that romance, and,
when it fails to do that, how nearly it can succeed in replacing
romance by married bondage. If I were dictator, I think I
would make it illegal for any young man of decent education
to marry until he had not only read The Egoist, but passed an
examination in it.

Unfortunately, men either didn't read The Egoist or didn't
assimilate its lessons, but women did. And the revolt of
woman, which has been going on all this century, is not a
mere political affair, as we try to persuade ourselves that it has
been ; it's not a mere matter of getting the vote or getting
the right to take degrees and practise at the bar and so on.
Nor is it a matter of social conventions merely, getting rid of
the chaperone and wearing short hair and short skirts, and
playing men's games and smoking. It's something far deeper
and more significant than that. Beneath the surface of it all
there has been a steady revolt on woman's part against the
code which made it her business to be professionally unsel-
fish, and so play up, continually, to the selfishness of man.
You will recognize from what I said just now that I think
women had, in the first instance, the right on their side. But,
you know, they are getting their own back with a vengeance.
On a privileged occasion like this it is possible to be frank, and
to say that many women and many of those especially who
try to conform to a modern type, have not been content

20O In Soft Garments

merely to protest against man's selfishness ; they have imitated
it. It isn't that they smoke, or swear, or drink cocktails, that
isn't the trouble; the trouble is that they are expecting men
to do the Hon's share in the way of unselfishness ; and that
doesn't work. Men aren't made that way. That's the cause of
half the trouble, at least, which we have been discussing this
term.

"Well, you will see that I am not being very encouraging to
you about your matrimonial prospects. I am inviting you to
realize that, unless you marry a type of woman who is not too
common nowadays, and is not, nowadays, sought in marriage,
you have got to be more unselfish men than your fathers and
grandfathers were before you; or else there will be ship-
wreck. And what makes matters worse is that your particular
generation is, by force of circumstances, a selfish generation.
I am not going to try and bring home that charge of selfish-
ness to you personally ; that might look as if I were merely
venting a private grievance of my own, and this is no place
for such an exercise. I am content to point out that your
generation has every temptation to be selfish, every excuse
for selfishness, if you like to call it so ; and that, just at the
moment when it is important for you to be more unselfish
than ever. In the first place, you were all brought up as young
children during the war.* That was a time, believe it or not,
when the greater part of Europe was being unselfish, under
the strain of a great emergency. And whatever qualities
parents do or do not hand on to their children, one thing is
certain ; an unselfish parent doesn't make an unselfish child.
The unselfish parent, unless the unselfishness is tempered by a
rare degree of prudence, indulges the child, does everything
for it, is constantly at its beck and call, condones faults,
smoothes over difficulties, and, as a general rule, spoils the
child. Now, you were brought up by your mothers, not by
* This was written in 1932.

Unselfishness in Marriage 201

your fathers. Your fathers were fighting, or overworking
themselves, or risking their lives somehow ; and your mothers
were left at home to lavish on you all the care they would
have liked to bestow on their husbands your mothers, you
see, still belonged to the unselfish tradition of womanhood.
Nothing seemed too good for you, who had come into the
world to replace the generation that was fighting and dying.
You had rarity value, and you were spoilt

And then, beset with the temptation to selfishness through
passing your nursery days in the time of the Great War, you
are beset with a further temptation to selfishness, growing to
manhood as you are at the time of the great slump. The
question, how you are ever going to get a job, how that job is
going to keep you, still worse, how it is going to keep a wife
and family, absorbs you as it never absorbed your predeces-
sors. Human nature after all is constant, and the man who is
under the immediate necessity of looking after himself has less
time, less inclination, to look after other people. He has less
scope for unselfish ambition because, on merely economic
grounds, his selfish ambitions have to come first. Also, the
less prospect there is of having fun during the rest of your
lives, the more determined you are, naturally, to have fun
while the going is still good. Where are we going to get the
unselfish husbands for the women who have come to despise
feminine unselfishness, and stamp it as Victorian ?

Of all virtues, unselfishness is perhaps the most evidently
Christian. It is starred all over the New Testament in phrases
which rise familiarly to the lips of the most ignorant ; he who
loves his life shall lose it, greater love hath no man than this,
if any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take
up his cross, and so on. A Christian virtue: there is no Latin
for selfish and unselfish. There is no Greek for selfish and un-
selfish. Unselfishness at its highest point belongs, no doubt,
to the more remote paths of holiness; unselfishness of some

202 In Soft Garments

kind is expected of every Christian ; it is, or at least it is meant
to be, the badge of our tribe.

And of all failings, selfishness is the most difficult to detect
in our own characters. That goes without saying ; it is one
of the first effects of selfishness to make us feel thoroughly
pleased with ourselves. I think occasionally we can detect it in
ourselves if we watch, carefully, our judgments of other
people. If, for example, you never notice whether other
people are selfish or not, that probably means you are selfish
yourself, and have lost all sense of the considerateness which
human beings ought to show to one another. On the other
hand, if you are constantly finding everybody else selfish, that
means you are selfish yourself, just as the man who thinks the
rest of the world mad may be quite certain that he is a lunatic.
If you are continually grousing and discontented, that is again
a sure sign. But, of course, selfishness is a thing we should all
be on our guard against, whether we are conscious of it or
not, for it is close to the roots of all our characters ; whether it
is in small things, as, for instance, in refusing to play with your
young brothers and sisters, or in larger things, like con-
sistently wasting your time and your money when your
parents are making sacrifices to give you a university educa-
tion, you will be pretty sure to find it in your character, if
you are unselfish enough to look.

Unselfishness is the best condition of happiness in marriage.
That is true, even if the marriage is a childless one; perhaps
I ought rather to say, that is especially true if the marriage is a
childless one. For a married couple, in those circumstances,
are living on their capital ; there is no romance of parenthood
to complement, to succeed if need be and even to supersede
the romance of marriage itself. Marriage, with or without
children, can only be what it is meant to be, a lifelong
romance, on one condition that the husband's attitude is one
of lifelong courtship. To suppose that, once a woman has said

Unselfishness in Marriage 203

"Yes," her will thenceforth is entirely her husband's will, so
that he can treat her as he likes and dispose of her as he likes, is
a supposition which barely works out even in those backward
civilizations where women are accustomed to being treated as
chattels. In the European civilization of yesterday, that
supposition led to a great deal of misery among women, from
which they had no legitimate escape. In the civilization of
to-day, it leads in a straight line to the divorce court. The
women you are going to propose to are less yielding, less
compliant, if the bare truth must be told, less unselfish than
their mothers, much less so than their grandmothers. And,
when courtship is over, when the honeymoon is over, they
will still want from you the attentions, the consideration, the
readiness to consult their own moods and their own wishes,
which will come natural to you during the courtship, during
the honeymoon but not afterwards. That is where you will
have to put force on yourself, sometimes, if you are to treat
the sacrament of marriage unselfishly. "Giving honour to the
female, as to the weaker vessel" that is how St Peter (who
was himself a married man, as the Anglican wedding service
rather ungenerously points out) describes the attitude of the
Christian husband. Consideration of the wife that is true
especially where the inner sanctities of marriage are con-
cerned ; it is true also of the ordinary details of everyday life.
The unselfishness, nowadays, has got to come in great
measure from your side. If I was giving a conference at Cher-
well Edge, I should be putting another side of the case as well ;
but for you here that's the important thing to understand
don't judge of your wives from your mothers ; they belong
to a different generation.

And of course, when the question of bringing up a family
comes in, you won't need to be reminded that unselfishness is
a quality absolutely necessary to Christian parenthood ; more
so than ever now, when the class to which most of you belong

204 I n Soft Garments

by birth is a class which tends, from one generation to another,
to become poorer. You must have noticed, living as you do in
a society which discusses its future married arrangements with
a singular lack of reticence, how people always try to make it
appear as if it was just the other way as if it was entirely
from unselfishness that they don't want to have a family, or
don't want to have a large family. "I'm not going to marry
till I'm forty, 9 ' they say, "or anyhow I'm not going to have
any children till I'm forty, because if I did I shouldn't have
enough money to give them the same educational advantages
I've had myself." We must no longer talk of selfish bachelors,
as our fathers did ; the bachelors are the unselfish people who
want to spare several unborn souls the misery of not being
brought up at Harrow. I'm afraid, you know, that that kind
of unselfishness doesn't really bear looking into. What the
man means, at the back of his mind, is that he would rather be
known as the father of one son at Harrow than as the father of
two sons at Leatherhead. If he were really thinking of the
greatest happiness of the greatest number, he would find it
difficult to prove that a greater aggregate of happiness is
enjoyed by one Harrovian than by two Leatherhead boys.
And meanwhile, one would like to ask, what about himself?
What kind of car is he going to keep, which club is he going
to belong to, where is he going to spend his summer holidays,
smoking what kind of cigars? Is he really that's the point
out to make sacrifices ?

Well, I won't pursue that subject, which is rather an un-
gracious one. What I am concerned to point out is, that the
vocation to marriage is also, if it be God's will for you, a
vocation to fatherhood. And a vocation to fatherhood is, at
the best of times, a vocation which demands unselfishness, and
demands a considerable degree of trust in Providence. In
having children, you are tying up a great part of your happi-
ness in a set of other human beings who will, sooner or later,

Unselfishness in Marriage 205

escape from your control, and may easily become any sort of
nuisance. The man who has a small family does not escape
that danger; if anything, he rather increases it; for the chil-
dren of small families are very apt to be spoilt, and a small
family makes no provision for losses by death, by separation,
or by disgrace. In common experience, how often one sees
that one child can be more of a worry to its parents than six
would be ! If you scheme for your own happiness in marriage,
ten to one you will be disappointed, and you will have the
irritating feeling that there is nobody but yourself to blame
for it. If you enter upon marriage in a spirit of trust in God's
Providence, you are more likely to make a success of it, and
if you don't, you will at least be able to see God's plan for
you, not God's plan marred by your own interference. Please
don't think that I am encouraging all of you to embark upon
matrimony at once with no money and no prospects. You
must exercise reasonable prudence, or you will be a drag upon
others, your own parents particularly. But if and when you
are called to that state, you are called to an adventure, and to
an adventure which demands generosity that is the point.

XXIV
THE TORCH HANDED ON

A HIS conference is supposed to be about the
apostolicity of the Church and I'm rather glad
to be doing it myself, because if you put on a
visiting preacher to do it he is a tiny bit apt to
confuse the issues. Visiting preachers usually
start out with the idea that what these young chaps really
want is not so much apologetics as good sound moral advice ;
and the word "apostolic" seems a capital text to start from.
It is an excellent thing that every Christian should be an
aposde, but the apostolicity of the Church has nothing what-
ever to do with that. I think you might, as a matter of fact,
make out that there is a fifth mark of the Church, which
perhaps we might call apostolicahty. The Church has at all
times had the instinct that if there are heathen or heretics
about it is her job to try and convert them as much as the
circumstances allow; not to shrug her shoulders and say,
"These unfortunate people have a very different world-
picture from ours." And that distinguishes her. So I think
you could make out a case for the idea that one mark of the
true Church is that itch to make converts, which is always
described by our non-Catholic neighbours as proselytism,
except when they are doing it themselves.

But apostolicity means something quite different. It means
being in a position to trace your history, by a continuous

tradition, back to the apostles. I say by a continuous tradition,

206

The Torch Handed on 207

because, of course, in a general way every Christian denomi-
nation can trace its history back to the apostles. The Quakers,
for example, go back to George Fox in the early part of the
seventeenth century; and, of course, George Fox didn't have
to invent Christianity himself, he'd learned it from other
people, and those other people had learned it from other
people, and those other people had learned it from Catholics.
But the point is that George Fox deliberately broke away
from the main current of Christian tradition, and regarded
the Anglican churches as temples of Baal, and the Anglican
clergymen as priests of Baal. So that Quaker history doesn't
date from the apostles, and doesn't pretend to date from the
apostles, it dates from George Fox. Whereas we Catholics do
not trace our history back to Edmund Campion at the end of
the sixteenth century or to St Augustine of Canterbury at the
end of the sixth century ; we trace it back to the apostles
themselves, to whom our Lord's promises were made, and
we wouldn't claim to be the inheritors of those promises
unless we could show that we are the heirs of the apostles.

This idea of a continuous spiritual history involves several
different claims. In the first place, the whole notion of sacra-
mental life as we understand it demands that certain super-
natural powers should be handed on from one generation of
Christians to the next ; as really, as surely, as certain bodily
characteristics are handed down from father to son, genera-
tion after generation, in the natural order. The sacramental
process by which this tradition is assured has always included,
and is often described as, the laying on of hands. We know
that the apostles regularly laid hands on those whom they
appointed to succeed them in their ministry, and it is a plain
matter of history that that process of laying hands on people
has been going on ever since. It is only because he is ordained
by a bishop that a priest has the power to say Mass and to
perform certain other sacraments validly. The word validly

208 In Soft Garments

means, that a person not so ordained may go through all the
motions of performing those sacraments, but when he does
nothing happens.

If that were all that was meant by apostolicity, apostoHcity
would not be a distinctive mark of the true Church. For there
are Christian bodies which have a valid ministry and valid
sacraments, and yet do not belong to the true Church; most
of the Christians in the Near East, whether their doctrines are
orthodox or heretical in the light of the early Councils, are in
that position ; so are the Old Catholics in Holland and else-
where, a very small body of people who broke away at the
time when Infallibility was defined. And, of course, the
Anglicans diink they have valid orders ; and for that matter
some of the Presbyterians think they have valid orders ; but
to go into all that would be a long business, and as we shall
see immediately it does not matter a great deal whether they
have valid orders or not. For it is possible to have valid
orders coming down from the apostles, and yet not to have
a continuous spiritual history coming down from the
apostles.

How is that? Because a continuous spiritual history means,
not merely deriving certain supernatural powers from that
fountain of grace which was committed to the apostles, but
by deriving from that same apostolical tradition the right to
minister in God's Church, and to minister in this or that part
of God's Church. Our Lord said to his disciples, "As my
Father hath sent me, even so send I you" ; he commissioned
them to act in his name, and this commission to act is some-
thing which you must derive by legitimate descent from
them, no less than the power to perform spiritual acts. Ever
since our Lord said that, the Church has been sending people,
commissioning them to minister in this or that place, in this
or that capacity, and to minister without her commission is
an act of schism. Put it in this way for the sake of clearness;

The Torch Handed on 209

when you come and make your confession to me here, I can
give you absolution. But if you made your confession to me
on Boar's Hill, I couldn't give you absolution. Why is that?
Because I hold faculties from the Archbishop of Birmingham
to hear confessions in his diocese, which is north of the
Thames, but Boar's Hill, which is south of the Thames, is in
the diocese of Portsmouth, in which, it so happens, I don't
hold faculties. On your death-bed, you can get absolution
from any priest, even from a Greek Orthodox priest who is
in schism, even from a Nestorian priest who is a heretic;
because in the hour of death the Church supplies faculties to
all priests who have been validly ordained. But for ordinary
purposes you must hold a commission from a bishop who is
in communion with the Holy See before you presume to
exercise any ministerial functions at all.

Our submission is, then, that whenever there has been a
schism in the history of Christendom one side was in the
wrong, not merely because it broke away from that Catholic,
world-wide unity which the true Church must possess, but
because it tried to go back upon that apostolic, age-old con-
tinuity by which die true Church is equally marked. If you
look at the schism which has most to do with controversies
which affect our own country, the English Reformation, you
can see at once that it was a schism between the supporters
of an old, continuous tradition, and the supporters of a new
order of things. I know that Anglican controversialists eagerly
maintain the contrary ; try to make out that the continuous
tradition lies with them, not with us. But the tradition of
Anglicanism does not go back to those thirteen or fourteen
bishops who were left over at the end of Queen Mary's reign.
It goes back to the new set of bishops, whether validly con-
secrated or not it doesn't matter, whom Queen Elizabeth
intruded into their sees, without any ecclesiastical authority
for doing so. It is from them, from Queen Elizabeth's

210 In Soft Garments

nominees, that the Anglican Church of to-day derives, in
the last resort, its commission.

Further, in order to be apostolic a Church must have
continuity, not only of life but of faith. People sometimes
accuse us Catholics of having added to the faith; of having
foisted in doctrines which were no part of the original deposit,
that of the Immaculate Conception, for example. But nobody
seriously accuses us of having subtracted from the faith ; of
having dropped any article of belief which was an integral
part of theology as theology was understood by the early
Fathers. And that's important. The apostles, you see, were
in the first instance witnesses; people who could bear
testimony to certain things they had seen and heard, and hand
on that testimony to those who came after them. Every
Catholic bishop is the repository of a tradition which he took
over from his predecessor and is bound to hand on, un-
diminished, to his successor. That's why, if he has time
and opportunity, a Catholic bishop on his death-bed calls his
canons together and makes a solemn profession of faith; he
wants to make it clear that, in his time at least, the deposit of
tradition has not been tampered with.

Continuity of life, continuity of faith there you have the
essentials of that mark of apostolicity by which we distinguish
the true Church. I always feel we should do well to include
another kind of continuity, which is not often mentioned in
this connection, what you may call continuity of type. The
Catholic type, that's a thing which doesn't change with the
centuries. You could say a lot about it ; you could write a
book about it ; but the obvious, salient point to raise about it
is this, that it is tenacious, has a firm grip on the old things and
is suspicious of novelties. Quite often it pushes this tendency
too far, and has to admit that there was something in the new
things after all. It is a rather amusing and a very salutary
reflection that St Thomas was regarded as a dangerous

The Torch Handed on 211

innovator because he wanted to interpret Christian theology
in terms of Aristotle. "Good old Plato," people said, " what's
wrong with Plato ? He was good enough for St Augustine,
and he ought to be good enough for us." Well, of course,
they were wrong; and yet in a sense they were right; their
instinct was right. At the time, no doubt, the thing looked like
some sort of ramp. We've all suffered from it, this Catholic
instinct of caution ; God knows I have. But, though it has the
defects of its qualities, the Catholic type is admirably adapted
to secure, what its first business is to secure, the permanence
on earth of a great religious tradition, whose content is of the
supernatural, and whose origins are divine.

If for a moment I may assume the airs of a bishop on his
death-bed, and throw back my regard over the past, I would
say that this instinct of tenacity marks us off, us Catholics,
from all that I have known of non-Catholic religion in Ox-
ford, since I knew Oxford. As a member of this University, I
have the age of Christ; it is thirty-three years since I matricu-
lated. During the first nine of those years, I knew Oxford as
a Protestant ; during the last thirteen as a Catholic ; and during
all that time, the modern religious debate has been constandy
the subject uppermost in my thoughts. I can remember, when
I was an undergraduate, a sermon from the Bishop of Lon-
don, I mean, the one who is just retiring, then at the height of
his remarkable influence. He preached about the faith, and
gave us a parable, probably from some incident in the South
African War, about a wounded soldier with a flag in his
hands, "slipping . . . slipping/' And then, of course, he told
us that we mustn't let the faith slip like that. But Tm afraid
it is what we were doing, and what those who followed us
have been doing ever since. The instinct of holding on to
a religions tradition which you have received, handing it
on imdiminished to others, where is it now, outside the
Catholic Church? I don't say that there aren't many excellent

212 In Soft Garments

Christians among our non-Catholic friends ; of course there
are; many of them make us feel ashamed of ourselves. But
take a mass observation of our contemporaries, and you will
see, or at least I think I see, the traditions we held, the
assumptions with which we faced life, thirty years ago,
slipping between their hands.

It is just over forty years ago now, that Leo XIII first
allowed Catholics to go up to Oxford and Cambridge. If he
had foreseen the course of things, he would have said to them,
"I send you forth as lambs in the midst of wolves." Wolves
in sheep's clothing if you like ; wolves in Old Etonian ties and
so on, but wolves for all that ; I mean, in the sense that their
bewildered acquiescence in our modern materialism is an
influence working for the labefactation of all sane principles.
If he had seen you sitting here now, that great Pope would
have wished you, I think, the gift of tenacity.

Forty years, and now the Oxford chaplaincy is to change
hands for the fifth time.

Remember this the chaplaincy is not like a parish, in
which most of the work is routine work, and everything goes
on very much the same, as Father Smith succeeds Canon
Jones. The chaplain's work is a series of frantic experiments
made in the dark, based almost entirely on personal contact.
That means that every chaplain has to work in his own way,
tackle the situations that arise in the fashion which is best
suited to his own individual gifts, his own individual tastes. I
am leaving to my successor a document about six times as
long as this sermon, explaining to him exactly how every-
thing has been run while I have been here. I have left it to
him in the certainty, and almost in the hope, that he will set
to work on perfectly different lines as soon as he finds his feet
here. He will probably want to do all sorts of things which I
have never done. And that will arouse, in those of you who
are left here next year, that spirit of tenacity which, as I have

The Torch Handed on 213

been suggesting to you, is suspicious of every change, which
treats every fad of the last incumbent as if it were part of the
deposit of faith. It never used to be done like that (you will
find yourself saying) in the old days.

What I want to say to you, while I have still the oppor-
tunity of registering my protest, is, "For heaven's sake don't
say that." That habit of canonizing the last man, gracious in
itself, leads to such a lot of petty and unnecessary friction. I
want you to treat my successor as the chaplain whom God has
sent you, and to make things easy for him, as far as possible,
at the start ; after that, you won't need any encouragement
from me. But just at the start, do try to make things easy for
him. Go and see him, and let him make your acquaintance,
as soon as he has had time to comb out the freshers ; don't hang
about waiting for an invitation to dinner. I remember so well,
you see, how difficult it was starting on this job. Don't all go
rushing off to other churches in the town, as some of you do
already, just because a new man won't be able to see whether
you come or not.

I've been speaking to those who will still be up next year;
perhaps at unnecessary length after all, the work of a Uni-
versity chaplain is written in water ; even as he speaks, the
moving finger writes. My predecessor, a man of mature
wisdom, was once talking to me about some innovation he
had introduced ; and I said, "But wasn't that unpopular?" To
which he replied, "Very; but then, an undergraduate only
lasts three years." Let me speak to you for a moment not as
the undergraduates you are, but as the Catholic laymen in
the world you soon will be. One point I have tried to urge on
you at the end of each summer term and now let me leave it
with you as my testament. Every one of you, when he goes
down, ought somehow to enter into the corporate life of the
Catholic body ; not just to be the kind of Catholic who is seen
slinking off to Mass every Sunday, at the Oratory or at the

214 In^Soft Garments

Cathedral, a lost unit in the crowd. If nothing else occurs to
you, at least do this get to know your parish priest, and ask
if there isn't any way in which you can be of use to the parish,
even if it's only by taking elderly and infirm people to church
in your car how many of you have ever thought of that?
You see, a man's religion fits more naturally into the scheme
of his life if it involves for him something, however little,
over and above the plain duty of saying his prayers.

That is all the parting request I would make, except for
myself, that you would pray for me sometimes. God bless
you, and make us meet in heaven.

p

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